They’re Stars Off the Court

This was David Robinson seen through the eyes of a child. Robinson looked at the handiwork of 9-year-old Joshua Satterfield and marveled at the picture Satterfield drew of him and Robinson standing together.

He had only one complaint as he looked at the crayon version of himself.

“Why are my legs so skinny?” Robinson wondered.

Different perspectives, different views. Some people see these NBA Finals as devoid of star power because they have no players popular enough to go by single names or initials. There’s no Shaq, Kobe or A.I.

Instead there’s the San Antonio Spurs’ Robinson, eight years removed from his reign as the league’s most valuable player and, at most, two games from retirement.

There’s Dikembe Mutombo, who spent most of this season on the New Jersey Nets’ bench.

There’s Steve Smith, who lost his starting job at the beginning of the season and now is buried deep in the Spurs’ shooting guard rotation behind erratic Stephen Jackson, rookie Manu Ginobili and 37-year-old Steve Kerr.

And yet, many people see Robinson, Mutombo and Smith as the greatest players in the NBA.

Make that greatest people.

It’s a celestial gathering all right, bringing together perhaps the three greatest philanthropists in the league.

You can see the hard evidence of their deeds in a school in San Antonio, a learning center in East Lansing, Mich., and a hospital under construction in Congo.

You can hear it in the words of Tambra Satterfield, Joshua’s mother, when she talks about the Carver Academy school her son attends, which was founded with a $9-million donation by Robinson.

“I can tell you that [Robinson] is truly a godsend,” said Satterfield, a lifelong resident of east San Antonio, where the school is located. “I don’t know what made him choose the east side, but I believe that if he wanted to make a difference, he put his money where his mouth is.

“I’m just so proud and the children are so fortunate that he chose this area.

“He’s a beautiful person and so is his family. You get a lot of athletes that they don’t even want you close to them. He’s not like that. He’ll let you approach him. He’s very polite and receptive. He’ll do whatever is needed.

“For those reasons, I know that God’s going to continue to bless him.”

Robinson wanted to spread the wealth of his six-year, $66-million contract that expired in 2001. (He made $20 million over the last two seasons). The man who is such a do-gooder that Sports Illustrated once ran a picture of him with angelic wings and a halo decided to create a school after many hours of thought and prayer.

“My background has always been ... I loved education,” Robinson said. “I had a teacher’s heart, always. It kind of evolved. My wife and I sat down, we said, ‘What do we want to leave? What legacy do we want to leave in San Antonio?’

“Because the truth of the matter is, we’re not going to be here forever. You can put in a few dollars here and feed somebody here and do something here, but it’s like that old saying: You can feed a man a fish or you can teach a man to fish.

“And that’s kind of what we thought. What are we going to leave? And that’s where education came into play.”

Robinson provided almost half of the $20 million it cost to build the Carver Academy, which opened Sept. 17, 2001. Currently, there are 70 students from pre-kindergarten to third grade, and almost all of them receive scholarships for the $8,500 tuition. The school will add one 15-student grade each year until they reach 300 students.

Carver provides top-notch schooling to children who normally wouldn’t have a chance at a quality education. Students visit Japanese and Jewish cultural centers. They receive musical instruction twice a week. They learn Spanish, Japanese and German from a Fulbright scholar.

“It’s a unique experience to come to our school and 4-year-olds are counting in Japanese and German and singing about turtles,” Carver Principal Brenda Murphy said. “It’s so cute. They’re just so good.”

Joshua Satterfield was a charter student at the school.

“When I heard about the curriculum I though it would be very challenging,” Tambra Satterfield said. “My son is very shy. I thought this would be one way to get him out of the shell and get him involved, where he wouldn’t be afraid to speak under any circumstances.”

After two years, “One of the things is, his confidence level has really built up,” Satterfield said. “There was a time where he wouldn’t get in front of a group and do anything. Now they’ll use him for the little kids to help them with their reading and homework. His grades, his vocabulary have [been] enhanced tremendously.”

Robinson serves as the chairman of the school’s board, which meets every other month.

“During the school year, he comes by quite often,” Murphy said. “Next year, he will be coming in three days a week to help do the fund-raising.

“He reads to the children and talks to them. They teach him about the computer. He’s become like a big brother to the kids.”

Said Robinson: “The kids give me a great perspective. A lot of times you can get caught up in one game. After [losing] you feel a little bit down, but you go over there, those kids show you that there’s a lot more going on, the future’s a lot brighter than that little disappointment that you had.”

It says something about the unselfish nature of Robinson, Smith and Mutombo that none of the buildings they created bears their name.

Carver Academy is named for George Washington Carver, the African American scientist.

In 1997, after the first season of Smith’s seven-year, $50.4-million contract that ends this year, he gave $2.5 million for a student-athlete learning center at his alma mater Michigan State, under one condition: “I want my mom’s name on it.”

Clara Bell Smith died of cancer on Feb. 10, 1992, during Smith’s rookie year in the NBA.

“My mom didn’t attend college, didn’t attend Michigan State,” Smith said. “Michigan State University wanted my name on it. If I’m going to give the money, I wanted my mom’s legacy on it.”

So the two-story, 31,000-square-foot building that opened in September 1998 is known as the Clara Bell Smith Student Athlete Academic Center. It’s a place for Michigan State athletes to receive tutoring, learn study skills and use computers so they can graduate, as Smith did in 1991.

Smith also donated $600,000 for an endowment so that one graduate from his high school, Detroit Pershing, can attend Michigan State on a full scholarship.

In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), a 300-bed hospital under construction will be named after Biamba Marie Mutombo, Dikembe’s mother.

She died of a stroke in 1998, and Mutombo cites her death as another example of lives lost because of inadequate medical care in Africa. According to Mutombo, diseases and malnutrition contribute to the deaths of one out of 10 newborns, and half of the children won’t make it to age 5.

When completed (the current timetable is 30 months), the hospital will be the first new medical center in the area in more than 40 years. Mutombo, who is in the middle of a four-year, $65-million contract, has given $8.5 million of the more than $10 million raised so far. The target is $14 million.

“I’m so excited about it,” Mutombo said. “Every day I look in the sky and I say, ‘I would like to see the hospital open before I walk away from this earth. I tell my wife and my children about it.... That way, the entire world can see that a basketball player who came from nowhere and got a chance to become somebody, and was able to share some of his profit with people who didn’t make it where he is.”

Mutombo said only five of his NBA colleagues (including Dallas Maverick forward Dirk Nowitzki, who gave him a check for $50,000) have offered assistance. Why not more?

“That’s a question I don’t like to ask,” Mutombo said. “I love my friends around the league. Everyone in this league knows about the project. I used to feel a little bit angry about it, for the fact that the response was not overwhelming like I thought at the beginning of the project. I came to the [realization] that life goes on.

“So I need to reach out to the American public, who have been so generous for years and years, to accomplish my mission. I can’t wait on the so-called millionaires’ class to help me out.”

He’ll write more of his own checks if necessary. He has always come to the aid of his native country, whether it was fixing the roof of the embassy in Washington or providing uniforms to the national women’s basketball team for the 1996 Olympics.

But the hospital is his calling.

“That’s something I want to do so bad,” Mutombo said. “I feel like it’s God’s gift, God wants me to do it. Every time I wake up I feel like I have to accomplish this, regardless of what it’s going to cost.”

Like Robinson and Smith, there’s a passion in his voice. The players’ eyes light up when they’re asked about their projects, after endless questions about basketball. Sometimes it seems as if the sports they play are just a means to do greater things.

No need to wait for the tipoff of Game 6 tonight.

We know the winners in this series.

For more information or to make a donation:

The Carver Academy: www.thecarveracademy.org.

The Dikembe Mutombo Foundation: www.dmf.org.

The Steve Smith Scholarship Fund: www.sssfund.com.

J.A. Adande can be reached at j.a.adande@latimes.com.