Coming late to basketball, he nevertheless found stardom, retiring with the second-most blocked shots in league history. He devoted much of his life to humanitarian causes.
Dikembe Mutombo, who arrived at Georgetown University as an international student with aspirations of being a doctor but who instead became a towering presence in professional basketball and a dedicated humanitarian in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo, died on Monday in Atlanta. He was 58.
The cause was brain cancer, according to a statement by the National Basketball Association. His family announced in 2022 that he was undergoing treatment for a brain tumor in Atlanta.
Mutombo did not play basketball until midadolescence, having preferred soccer as a child. An older brother, Ilo, and his father, Samuel, encouraged him to try the sport in which his outsize frame, which ultimately stretched to 7 feet 2 inches, combined with his athletic agility, could be of greater benefit.
He wound up playing 18 seasons in the N.B.A. for six teams, retiring with the second-most blocked shots in league history behind Hakeem Olajuwon, another African-born center. Mutombo was known for his trademark finger wag, a provocative pose he used to dissuade shooters from challenging him at the rim.
At 21, Mutombo enrolled at Georgetown in 1987 on an academic scholarship after Herman Henning, an administrator at the United States Embassy in Kinshasa, the Republic of the Congo’s capital and a former high school basketball coach, sent word of him to John Thompson, coach of the vaunted Georgetown program.
After playing only intramural basketball during freshman year while gaining fluency in English, Mutombo abandoned pre-med courses, a concession to the demands of major college basketball. He switched to a double major in linguistics and diplomacy. He spoke French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and five African dialects.
