Head of the Class : Denver’s Dikembe Mutombo Is Standing Tall in a Season of Talented Rookie Players

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the league, the stack of Mutombo tales was already . . . real big?

There was the time Dikembe Mutombo and his team, the Denver Nuggets, were in New Orleans to play the Chicago Bulls in an exhibition during the football season. Mutombo walked slowly across the artificial turf of the football field on his way to the locker room in the empty Superdome. He suddenly stopped, dropped his bag and said, in his bass-drum voice:

“Personal foul, No. 55, offense.” He made a chopping motion on his wrist, imitating a football referee’s signal for the penalty. Mutombo wears No. 55 for the Nuggets. “First down.”

Last week, the Nuggets flew to Detroit and Mutombo walked to the back of the plane to talk to passengers and sign autographs. His signature is “DM 55,” which he recently shortened from “Mutombo 55” to cut down on the possibility of writer’s cramp. He certainly could not sign his full name, which is longer than his size-20 shoes: Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean Jacque Wamutombo. Mutombo said he likes to mingle.

“The people love me,” he said. “They see me working hard, trying to succeed. I am easy to introduce myself to the people. I love being around people.”

The Pistons wound up beating the Nuggets, though, and Mutombo was questioned afterward about a certain defensive play.

“Ah, but I had to stop the penetration of Isiah Thomas,” Mutombo said.

Mutombo was quickly reminded that doctors had put 40 stitches in Thomas’ head the week before and the Piston guard had not played. Mutombo shrugged.

“What do I know?” he said. “I do not know all the players.”

Ah, but Dikembe, they are learning all about you, very quickly. And what the NBA is discovering about the Nuggets’ 7-foot-2, 25-year-old rookie center, is that he might be signing his name, playing his game and expanding the Mutombo mystique for a very long time.

Here he is, the Franchise, which is pretty heady stuff for a sports team that had been going downhill so fast, it must have been on skis. Coach Doug Moe was fired after his seventh winning season in nine years. The team was sold and attendance plummeted. One of the team’s owners didn’t pay his rent and came home one day to find his furniture in the street.

Coach Paul Westhead was brought in to revive the team, tried a fast-paced game but, unfortunately, had too many players who would have been better moving furniture in the street. Westhead, a Shakespearean scholar, found himself in a tempest. The Nuggets lost 60 of 82 games.

Then Mutombo arrived. Suddenly, the clouds parted, the sun shone and basketballs began getting knocked back into people’s faces. The Nuggets are 10-15 this season.

“Dikembe Mutombo is our guy,” Westhead said. “He is our Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 15 years early. He does only good things. Therefore, he will eventually do only better things.”

Mutombo leads a charge of rookies that are having a sudden and not altogether expected impact on the NBA. He leads the Nuggets in scoring, rebounding and blocked shots, starting on the same unit with another heralded rookie, Mark Macon of Temple.

Around the league, the rest of the rookies are growing in stature almost daily. Larry Johnson, the 6-7, 250-pound No. 1 pick from Nevada Las Vegas, leads the Charlotte Hornets and is already showing signs of superstardom. Besides rebounding, scoring and running the court with surprising speed for a big man, Johnson also doesn’t do telephone interviews.

Others showing no hang-ups about rookie success in the NBA are 6-7 guard Steve Smith of Miami, 6-10 forward Doug Smith of Dallas, 6-9 Billy Owens of Golden State and 6-8 Stacy Augmon of Atlanta. All either start or get considerable playing time and have made significant impacts on their teams.

When Mike Monroe of the Denver Post described Johnson as Mutombo’s chief contender for rookie of the year, Mutombo disagreed.

“He is not my contender,” Mutombo said. “I am by myself.”

Actually, he might be right. What sets Mutombo apart is that his sphere of influence has expanded to every city in which he has played. Mutombomania?

His is sort of the classic story: One of eight children of a principal and a Sunday school teacher in Zaire, he didn’t play basketball until he was 18 and a senior in high school. But he spent three years with Coach John Thompson at Georgetown, where Mutombo learned English, changed his major from premed to linguistics and diplomacy, and began to master the jump hook.

He almost certainly took Wealth 101. Drafted No. 4 in the first round by the Nuggets, he signed a five-year, $13.7-million contract on the trunk of a car, then went inside to attend practice and start throwing shots all the way back home to Kinshasa.

He had attracted the attention of those rabid basketball fans in the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa when he played for Zaire’s national team and they started looking for an American university for him. Thompson, who knows a 7-2 center when he sees one, jumped in quickly. Mutombo, whose native language is French, studied English for five hours a day his first year at Georgetown, adding another language to the list of those he speaks fluently: French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and five African dialects.

Because he had hardly played, and therefore had no bad habits, Mutombo was sort of a laboratory experiment for Thompson. The Georgetown coach was able to start from the beginning with proper fundamentals, teach Mutombo the correct way to play basketball and not have to correct any ingrained faults.

Said Westhead: “John Thompson very meticulously schooled him in the proper way of playing basketball. He was taught by a very, very good coach, and only the right things.”

There appeared to be only one drawback. The NBA covets players who score as big as they stand, but Mutombo averaged only 9.9 points at Georgetown and there were some who wondered if he would be able to do the right thing as a pro. Denver General Manager Bernie Bickerstaff was not among them.

“John Thompson was the one person who was consistently saying, ‘Listen, the guy has offense,’ ” Bickerstaff said. “What John Thompson did was the same thing he did when he had Patrick (Ewing). He did not go to him very much, but he was preparing him for the next step.”

In the pros, Mutombo has exhibited a flair for creativity on offense. Sure, everyone knew he could block some shots and influence others, but when Mutombo started firing up those jump hooks, the league began to notice. Of course, it didn’t hurt that Westhead began putting the ball in Mutombo’s hands about 25 times a game.

“Skill-wise, I’ll throw an old name at you--Nate Thurmond,” Phoenix Sun Coach Cotton Fitzsimmons said. “That’s the way I see Mutombo. If he becomes half the defensive player Nate was, he’ll be fine. And Nate was the best one-on-one defender that ever played the game.

“On offense, I don’t know if anyone expected him to put up the numbers he has, but I sort of did because he was on a losing team,” he said.

Westhead said that Mutombo has had some trouble handling a double-team defense, but that it would be wrong to refer to him as a project because there is no question about his ability to play, even with the hopes of the franchise pinned to his jersey. Mutombo is averaging 18.8 points and 13.5 rebounds.

“In his case, project should mean he is not a complete player because he hasn’t played enough,” Westhead said. “Usually, projects refer to big guys who have been playing 15 years and they still can’t put their right foot in front of their left foot. As for being double-teamed, most rookies can’t even play when nobody’s guarding them, so the fact that he is having some trouble is understandable.”

After the college experience, Mutombo finds himself in a hurry to get wherever he is going. There is no time, he said. For example, simply look at the 24-second clock.

“You’re jumping from 45 clock to 24,” he said. “So 24 is much different. In college, you are going 45, which is much different. You can take almost an hour to cross the (center)line. That is something I have to deal with. The mental part. Another crazy part of the game.”

As quick a learner as he has proved to be, Mutombo has yet to master the art of acting as it pertains to drawing fouls. He has taken a few lessons, though, from Bill Laimbeer of the Pistons.

Mutombo rolled his eyes.

“Oh, there is tricks,” he said. “Those veterans like Laimbeer, he did two tricks. He got a foul from me. He did two tricks for me posting up and he react right away, he make the ref look like I throw some elbow, and that is a trick most of the veterans know. Those old guys been doing that to me.

“I am still learning this trick. They are just doing a test, being a rookie, you know.

“I am not playing basketball for a long time, but everything in basketball seems new to me. The big transition that I just made from the college to the NBA has caused me to adjust myself quickly because there is no way to adjust slowly.”

One thing is sure, Mutombo has already adjusted to the NBA quickly enough to have displayed a fairly mature sense of humor. He managed to break up Westhead and cut short a Nugget practice after less than an hour when he said: “Coooooaaaaach, we have been here four hours.”

You have to experience the voice, which sounds like a French James Earl Jones. You could easily imagine him narrating old NFL highlight films: “From the gloomy, frozen tundra of Lambeau Field, the gladiators of Coach Vince Lombardi. . . . “ The rich voice is highlighted by a lilting French accent, and the combination is hilariously funny to Mutombo’s Nugget teammates.

“I don’t really know if his sense of humor is odd,” Walter Davis said. “But the way he says it is sure odd. I say ‘What did you say? Repeat that for me.’ I can get him to repeat it four or five times, then I just crack up.”

Mutombo is already a veteran of good-natured ribbing from his teammates in the locker room, and he relishes every bit of it.

“They are on me,” he said. “They are on me every day. They love me.”

The nonsports world is going to be exposed to Mutombo very soon. A record is due out, followed by a video, of course. Called “The Dikembe Block,” its melody comes from the 1960s Chubby Checker hit “Limbo Rock.” Mutombo’s marketing firm, DIC Sports of Burbank, wants to bring Dikembe to your house.

Meanwhile, if you are in the Denver school system, the Nuggets want to bring Mutombo to your classroom. He is the team spokesman for a stay-in-school program.

Last week, the Nuggets promoted the school program and Mutombo appeared at a supermarket. In a flyer advertising the event, Mutombo was pictured sitting down, holding an apple in one hand, his arm resting on a zoology book.

Yes, they will love him in this city, and Mutombo says he is already growing to love it. He drives around town in a red Chevy Blazer, wears thermal underwear and tries to get used to the elevation. And you thought the NBA was all he had to worry about.

“But is hard to play sometimes,” Mutombo said. “Sometime I have a problem to get my sleep. The altitude sometime kill me. But I love this place. The people love me.

“But skiing, that is something I will not ever go to do. I am never going skiing, never. I have seen so many people breaking their legs. Maybe they will put it in my contract. Besides, they do not have ski shoes my size.”

Mutombo threw back his head and laughed. So he doesn’t want to ski. With his voice, maybe Mutombo can become a world-class singer. That is, if he isn’t elected mayor first.