A fragile thread of human reciprocation
Remembering Dikembe Mutombo, and wondering who we are without him.
Matt Bonner was telling me about Sicily. He’d played there for a year, right after he was drafted into the NBA — Messina. Kind of a verbal handshake deal between him and the Raptors, because the team didn’t have a roster spot for him.
He loved Sicily, he said. I wanted to climb Mount Etna on my birthday, I told him. His eyes got wide, he huffed a laugh. Better up your incline! He said. You know it’s active, right? He asked. I assured him yes, he was still dubious. Our conversation wound around as the section of arena concourse cordoned off for Raptors Media Day amplified in buzzing background noise, excited chatter picking up. Abruptly, Matt came right back to Etna.
I guess there’s towns on the mountain that have been there for thousands of years, he nodded, maybe mentally acquiescing to the feat I’d put forth. They take you up in a jeep, I assured him, then there’s a gondola, then you climb. He nodded, eyes faraway for a few seconds. Maybe thinking about being in Sicily at 23 and seeing Etna for the first time, rearing up. Maybe just being in Sicily at 23. I thought about how, now, I was always going to think about Matt Bonner when I thought about Mount Etna. Then I thought, briefly, the words Mount Mutombo, one of the nicknames given to Dikembe Mutombo.
On the dais, Masai Ujiri sat shakily down for the second time that morning. His gaze lit out on the rows of media like a lighthouse beacon; sweeping, searching, seeing everyone but not settling. He had come back to talk about his friend, Dikembe Mutombo. He had come back because like all of us, he’d just learned the news of Mutombo’s death at 58 years old and, with the entire contingent of Toronto basketball media gathered over catered pastries and watery carafe coffee for Media Day, the professional inclination was to address the room. From what I know of Ujiri, and his relationship with Mutombo as a mentor, colleague and friend, the personal inclination is always twined with the professional. From what I know of grief, the inclination is to retreat and reminisce, simultaneously; to speak both concisely and expansively as you can of a life.
Ujiri fought all these overriding instincts to start, voice at first his declarative one. He fiddled with his phone, like an anchor. Just heard the news about, he managed to say before a pang of reality yanked his breath away. He choked up, pressing a hand into his forehead, searching his pockets for tissue and not finding any, raised his brows and said something quietly to himself.
I just heard the news about Dikembe Mutombo, Ujiri started again, voice tremulous. It’s really hard to believe, and it’s hard for us to be without that guy, he said, spreading his hand wide across his heart.
Ujiri gathered himself, lost himself, gathered again. I hate to, he said, trailing off. Toronto PR checked on him from the wings. It’s a tough one, he repeated. That guy, he said, voice breaking, he made us who we are. That guy is a giant.
Ujiri seemed to find his stride, or at least, slipped into step with grief to turn and ask a question of it: Who are we without Dikembe Mutombo?
The next eight minutes were vignettes of a life, Mutombo’s, as they came to Ujiri. Sensory details, like how good the smell was inside the hospital Mutombo opened in Kinshasa. Not like any other hospital. Travelling with him for 20 years every year for Basketball Without Borders, seeing his “big legs hanging high” in airports. Slipping from past to present tense. He remembered seeing Mutombo on a flight in Atlanta after Ujiri had been named director of scouting for the Nuggets and Mutombo, pointing at his casual travel clothes, asking why he was dressed that way when he’d just been promoted. Or in South Africa, when a handful of players who had been picked to meet with Nelson Mandela showed up in the hotel lobby dressed in sweats, and Mutombo told them all to “go back upstairs and dress like you’re going to meet Nelson Mandela.”
The more Ujiri shared, the stronger his voice grew. Grief and its destabilizing swells coming in ebbs instead of waves.
Ujiri is a demonstrative person, not guarded about showing emotion. I’ve been in youth basketball camps where he’s shown up and let himself be teased by pre-teen girls before asking them to quiet and telling them how powerful they are, his voice warm with pride. Watching him on presser podiums over the seasons there have been flashes of frustration, regret, joy, his voice speeding with urgency when he’s excited and slowing with trepidation over something you can tell he’s still processing. The only time I had seen his public face hold to a steely mask was when Toronto won their title in Oakland, and an Alameda sheriff shoved Ujiri backwards, twice, hard, when he tried to get to the floor and join his team. I understand why, he had a fleeting window to a hard-won moment and an abuse of power by a cop towards a Black man moving with purpose threatened to slam it shut (“I lost a moment, some people lose their lives,” Ujiri said, years later).
Still, I had never seen Ujiri as overcome as he was, processing in real time the death of Mutombo. In that stretch there was an apparent sense of responsibility — to a life, a friend — but also trust. The room quieted. ‘Rapt’ is the wrong word but I felt everyone around me perceptibly still, lean forward, unsure what to offer but wanting to offer our most basic human response to another person’s grief in opening ourselves, showing we have heard their pain. It felt like a privilege. To witness but also to come so close to Mutombo, if momentarily, through the vivid memories of someone who knew and loved him so well.
Something that gets lost in watching back postgames and press conferences is the current of emotion going from one person to another, zinging around the room in real-time. A thread of reciprocation, held to varying degrees of strain — easily, tenuously, white-knuckled. It’s palpable. Even the more rote exchanges have a few seconds where the practised 4th wall between speaker and audience is broken: someone struggles to pull in their chair, knocks the mic, reacts to the room. The danger in forgetting that these exchanges are between people entrusted to each other, within a moment, is plain when you scroll through the comments under the recorded clips of them, shared and aggregated later. Questions of veracity, intention, personhood. Troubling how easy to fire off while watching a recording, what that says about how readily we turn a person into arms-length entity.
In Ujiri’s second time on the podium, the current of emotion, jagged and surging, split open. It became palpable. If it was a privilege to be invited into his raw processing of grief, then how receptive we were to it, how adherent and in total trust, gave me hope.
Who are we without Dikembe Mutombo?
Since his death on September 30th, there’s been an outpouring of beautiful, thoughtful tributes, all attempting to get at the expansiveness of Mutombo. April Saul of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote about accompanying Mutombo to the DRC as a photojournalist (and shared some incredible photos from that trip, all which I’d never seen before) when he was trying to break ground on the hospital it would take him six years to construct. Abe wrote about Mutombo’s joyful embrace of his otherness, Rob wrote a beautiful obituary. So many people wrote, spoke, or shared snippets of their stories with or alongside Mutombo, and did it urgently. Compelled to contribute, to be in communion knowing these were drops in a bucket. Impossible, already, to distill down a life, harder when it’s a life as large as Mutombo’s. All to say — while I still don’t quite know what to say — this too is a drop.
I met Mutombo for the first time in 2015. He was visiting a new tech incubator in Toronto, OneEleven, where Steph was working out of at the time. She told me someone from the NBA was visiting, did I want to come for the panel and the meet and greet? I was working at Penguin Random House then, right across the street, and ran over. It’s wild to think that at that point, Mutombo had only been retired from the NBA for six years (he would sub into an NBA exhibition game in Johannesburg a couple months later, he and Hakeem Olajuwon ditching their suits at the sideline to do it). His 18 season NBA career not only an anomaly for athletes of his size and physicality, but an anomaly to that era of the game. That his rigorous attention to his physical and mental health, his recovery, would have seemed an oddity whereas now it’s necessity.
In each photo Mutombo took with everyone (I mean everyone) at that event, he held up his finger anew, encouraging people to do the same. I would start writing about NBA basketball with intention a year later but remember the excitement of proximity then. Not to “a star” — though he was that, the bigness Mutombo exuded was in his awareness — but to someone with the game’s reverberations running through them. It wasn’t hard to picture his giant hands, one which I’d just shook, plucking a basketball out of midair like a ready fruit. It was harder to imagine it levelling shot attempts and a team’s offensive hope, though I wondered if he could feel any of those big blocks stinging in his palms if he really thought about it.
I interviewed Mutombo in July 2022, just before he flew to L.A. to accept a humanitarian award at the ESPYs. On the phone he sounded tired, his gravelly voice deepening as our conversation went on, making it harder to transcribe later. His frequent chuckles — testament to his humour and mischievous streak — did too. When the topic of taunts came up, he was incredulous and completely delighted with Steph Curry’s introduction of the now ubiquitous “night night” in the 2022 playoffs, telling me he couldn’t stop laughing when he saw it. Hearing Dikembe Mutombo earnestly say “What the heck” is a highlight of my career. I remember I started laughing at the phrase, and he did too.
Mutombo was diagnosed with brain cancer two months after that call, in October 2022.
Who are we without Dikembe Mutombo? I was asked a variation of it for a local Toronto television hit, hours after Ujiri had put forth his impossible rhetorical. What did it mean to lose him? The vastness of the prompt, though I knew it’s what I was going to be asked, felt unnavigable. I mentioned the league losing its legends, how it was a new terrain of loss on the individual level but also the collective level, this public trust of legacy. It was true, is true, but didn’t address very well the specifics of why the loss of Mutombo is so great. Frankly staggering.
There isn’t another person with league ties, pro sports ties, even in wider humanitarian work who can step into the void Mutombo left. He was tireless. Not out of an obligation that dawned on him as an eventuality, mid or late career, it was there all along. A primary sense of responsibility to people, and the consequence of that responsibility, as a default. When we spoke and I asked him what was next he heaved a happy sigh as if to say, what wasn’t? He had by then opened a tuition-free school in the DRC, a hospital in Kinshasa, had worked with NGOs to improve access to clean water across the continent of Africa, been named the first Global Ambassador of the NBA, sat on the Board of Directors for the Special Olympics Committee and UNICEF, travelled as an envoy to South Sudan for the US State Department, worked throughout the pandemic to secure and improve access to Covid vaccines in Africa, launched a coffee company to support the economic autonomy of women farmers in Africa — this is only scratching the surface.
A lot of NBA athletes have foundations or are involved with charities, but fewer approach the weight of the work being done through those arms and entities as affirming to carry, pressing themselves into it. Mutombo didn’t try to glamourize the effort or feign its ease, he acknowledged the work was work. That was paramount given the work concerned the daily livelihood of people and their dignity, in turn. The moral of the stories about Mutombo chastising executives and players for not dressing appropriately were never sartorial. There was gravity, grace, pride in the work, even in the orbit of the work — Ujiri gaining the formalized power to scout throughout Africa, the ripples of which changed lives and led to Giants of Africa, Ujiri’s foundation — as much as there was joy.
It’s strange to think how antiquated this reads as a model, maybe because its walking, towering example of duality is gone.
Mutombo was the person who personally invested $15 million into his $29 million hospital, struggling to get his NBA colleagues to invest (Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning did without hesitation), and he was also the person who routinely waited for Michael Jordan to reach the apex of a dunk before lifting from a standstill to shove him out of the sky. He was the person who switched his college major from pre-med to a double major in diplomacy and linguistics, given the demands of Georgetown college basketball. He was the person, in the summer the Atlanta Hawks signed him, who bought school busses and shipped them to the DRC. Who former NBA Commissioner David Stern begged to stop doing the finger wag but refused, citing all the attention it garnered being good for his humanitarian fundraising.
Who blocked Grant Hill at one end to turn around and dunk at the other, who called Joel Embiid his “baby boy”, and who, despite his pride, talent and skill, was staunch about basketball being only a vehicle to drive life-altering change for people.
Who are we without Dikembe Mutombo? Worse, in many ways, with perennially encroaching divisiveness and malaise for all the people who need help, in all the places where the world is turning ragged, like turning inward will stop the same from happening where we are. And still we’re better, for having him as a force and example at all.
Better for his work, a tremendous lifetime of it, and showing the kinder, maybe the best, sides of ourselves when examining the loss of that lifetime so startlingly soon. When we’re in communion with a force greater and one Mutombo was consistently able to tap into, this fragile thread of human reciprocation.
🙏🙏🙏