Dikembe’s Dilemma

Dee-KAM-bay Moo-TAWM-bo is upset.

Everyone’s asking what he will do when his contract is up this summer. He doesn’t know. Besides, he’s easily upset, as when he was left out of last season’s All-Star game and announced that the league office could go to hell.

He gets upset when his name, phonetically spelled above, is mispronounced by public address announcers around the league. It betokens disrespect and Dikembe Mutombo, a respectful man, himself, will have none of it. Get it right or you know where you can go too.

Who taught such an extraordinarily nice man this gangsta rap? How did a youth from Zaire, who didn’t start playing basketball until he was a senior in high school, wind up three months from fame, fortune and the freedom to chart his own NBA path?

Should he re-sign with the Denver Nuggets at the price suggested by his agent, David Falk, $13 million a year, or as the New York Post’s Pete Vecsey notes, $1 million for every point in his career scoring average? Or join a better team in a bigger city, such as the Lakers?

How is he supposed to know until summer? Mutombo says he won’t discuss it anymore. Absolutely not.

“I’m being asked about it every day,” he says, laughing, his bass voice reverberating off the walls like the speakers at a rock concert.

“Every two seconds. I can be in my room, I’ll be asked about that. My fiancee has been asked about it. My brothers, my friends have been calling my house and say, ‘Hey, Deke, what you gonna do? Are you going to stay with the Nuggets?’

“People are wondering because I build the house in Denver and many people think that makes it 100% guaranteed that Dikembe Mutombo is willing to stay in Denver. I don’t know about it. You know, I build the house because I want to get some place to sleep, where I can come at night and know that this is my house and that nobody’s bothering me to pay rent or nothing.

“I don’t know what I will say tomorrow. You know, I did say at the beginning before the season started, I did say I was going to stay with Denver. . . . I don’t know. I’m avoiding to think about it and you, as media, are putting a double pressure on my mind right now. You just say, ‘Deke, you got to think about it . . . and we need an answer; we just want to know where you are.’

“I’m not having a fight with media but the pressure I’m getting--are you guys working for the Denver Nuggets or something? The best thing to do, just no free-agency questions.”

This is one of the longest “no comments” on record but that’s Mutombo, the world’s nicest, most sophisticated and best educated gangsta.

If he weren’t a basketball player, you’d wonder how so many contradictions could have been built into one man. Of course, he is, so it’s easy.

*

The first basketball Mutombo played in this country was on the playgrounds of Washington, D.C.

He had just arrived at Georgetown on an academic scholarship, which he won for high marks in calculus and chemistry on a U.S. State Department exam. He arrived too late to play as a freshman, but that was fine; his game wasn’t ready, nor was he. He had grown up speaking French--his father was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris--and also spoke Spanish, Portuguese and four African dialects. But he was just taking up English.

So he learned the game--and the language--from people who wanted to dunk over an awkward lad of 7 feet 2 and the language from people who talked of “faces” and “rocks” and issued taunts that can’t be printed in newspapers.

Then there were the summer pickup games at school, Patrick Ewing coming home to play the young tiger, Alonzo Mourning, and the new kid, Mutombo. They became tight as brothers and fought like brothers too, so there was more taunting and cursing and laughing. To this day, all three spend summers in big homes in the same neighborhood near campus and battle daily in the same gym.

Of course, Ewing and Mourning had each been the top player in his high school class.

Mutombo barely played in high school, finally coming out at the urging of an older brother. In his first practice, he was asked to jump over a rope, tripped, fell and cut himself on the chin, scarring himself for life, if minimally.

After deciding on Georgetown--a relative lived in the area--Dikembe wrote basketball Coach John Thompson, saying he hoped to come out for the team.

Thompson, who had heard wild stories before, didn’t pencil him right into the lineup.

“Coach Thompson sent a few people in the airport to greet me,” Mutombo says. “The two assistant coaches who came to greet me were hiding, to make sure that I was 7 foot. If I was not 7 foot, they were just going to let the campus people pick me up. Soon as they realized that I ducked my head at the door, they said, ‘He’s 7 foot.’ Then they called my name out.

“I never thought I would be coached by a man that tall and that big [Thompson is 6-10, 300 pounds] in my life. I saw somebody coming up from the door, he was almost the size of the door and I was like, ‘Who is this? Is he a basketball player or what?’

“He says, ‘I’m John Thompson.’ I say, ‘Oh my God, this is the man I wrote the letter to?’

“We shook hands. He asked me if I could touch the rim. I touched the rim. He said, ‘We can do something with this guy.’ ”

By the time he left Georgetown, Mutombo was 7-2 and could touch the rim on his tiptoes, without jumping. If he would never be graceful, he was a force on defense, where his strength and his huge wing span made him a good rebounder and the NBA’s top shot blocker.

The Nuggets got him with the fourth pick in 1991, behind the Charlotte Hornets’ Larry Johnson, the New Jersey Nets’ Kenny Anderson and the Sacramento Kings’ Billy Owens, the latter two turning out to be disappointments.

Mutombo, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise, leading the woebegone Nuggets back toward respectability, although the high-water mark was a 41-41 record and a first-round upset of Seattle two seasons ago.

Mutombo has been Americanized. He was engaged to a U.S. woman but called it off just before the wedding when she wouldn’t sign a prenuptial agreement. He arrived in this country with body fat measured at an astoundingly low 1.9% but it’s 6.8% now.

“It went up,” he says, laughing. “You know, you have to go to Mickey D once in a while, Wendy, all those soul-food places.”

Fortunately, he’s only half-Americanized. He annually leads summer tours to Africa, for which he receives nothing. Once he took Mourning and Ewing. They thought they were going to see lions and tigers. Mutombo is constantly amazed to find that most Americans learned everything they know about his native continent watching Tarzan movies.

Mutombo once conducted basketball clinics in Soweto and dined with South African President Nelson Mandela. He took the breakup of Mandela’s marriage as a sign he was supposed to go home to find a wife and he did. He is now engaged and he and his fiancee are rearing two of his young nephews, sons of an older brother who died.

Mutombo is averaging his usual 11 points and once again leading the league in blocked shots at 4.6 a game. Keeping him is the Nuggets’ top priority but they’ve had a turbulent and disappointing season. Coach Bernie Bickerstaff benched him for the fourth quarter of a recent game and they had to have a meeting to straighten that one out. Then came the Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf affair, with the American Legion passing out flags at Nugget games and three radio disc jockeys invading a mosque.

“Stuff happens,” said Mutombo, “but I don’t know why it keeps happening to us.”

The Nuggets keep struggling. Mutombo keeps moaning. Falk keeps saying he expects him to remain in Denver. Dikembe will let the Nuggets know in July.

“It’s not going to be easy summer,” Mutombo says. “Hopefully, I can have a good summer where I can go to the beach and relax.”

It hasn’t been the season he was hoping for but he’ll be richer soon and wherever he wants to be. For Dee-KAM-bay Moo-TAWM-bo, the NBA, it’s FAN-tastic.