Before he was “Mount Mutombo” to Denver, Dikembe was one Denver-area family’s dear friend who could eat a mountain of macaroni and drink a lake of orange juice.
They met over dinner in 1991, through a mutual acquaintance. Dikembe Mutombo was a 7-foot-2 Congolese basketball player who’d arrived in the United States seeking a medical degree and left Georgetown as the No. 4 overall NBA draft pick. Now he was moving farther west, to another place where he knew nobody, not even his soon-to-be teammates with the Nuggets.
Dikembe Mutombo and his wife, Rose, third from right, after the funeral of John Buckner, whose family took care of Mutombo and developed a close friendship when he was first drafted by the Nuggets into the NBA. (Photo courtesy of Janet Buckner)
His college academic advisor had a brother who lived in Aurora. The advisor put them in touch, and Mutombo was invited over for dinner. So were the Buckners, a family in the neighborhood. John Buckner in particular was a huge basketball fan. He was familiar with the shot-blocking prowess that made Mutombo a compelling prospect from John Thompson’s Georgetown team.
But the conversation that night barely touched on basketball. John, Janet and their twin daughters were delighted by Mutombo’s charisma. When the evening came to a close, Janet Buckner approached him. “I know you don’t know us, but here’s my phone number,” she told him. “I’m a good cook. If you want a home-cooked meal, give me a call.”
She wishes she could see his caller ID appear one more time. There was time to process the severity of his brain cancer, which his family revealed in 2022. But the end still feels so sudden. Mutombo died Monday at 58, leaving a void in the basketball community and in the Buckner family, which cared for him during his rise to stardom in Denver.
Even in those early days of Mutombo’s basketball career, it was apparent that he had hope for himself and the world beyond his professional calling.
“It wasn’t just the basketball connection,” said Janet Buckner, a state senator since 2021. “It was just that human appeal and that deep feeling of love for someone.”
Mutombo took her up on her offer the day after they met, much to Buckner’s surprise. She made chicken and two casserole dishes of mac and cheese that night. “I was glad I made the extra,” she said, laughing. She was beginning to learn how much Mutombo loved pasta. Spaghetti became the most common meal when he visited. And orange juice. Always orange juice.
“He would just call and say, ‘I’m coming over. You got any food?’” she said. “… Our friendship started that simply.”
It endured because of their conversations. Mutombo enlightened the Buckners with stories of his home in Africa. He charmed them with his humor. And he inspired them with his ambition to help people. He was hellbent on building a hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known at the time as Zaire. He wanted to build a school to improve education standards, too, a topic he discussed often with John, who was the principal at Overland High School. Basketball, Mutombo always hoped, could be a means of accomplishing his loftier goals.
Not that he didn’t love the sport. One of the Buckners’ daughters played competitively at the time. Mutombo occasionally showed up at her games. “The referees of the games didn’t really like that,” Buckner said, “because he would let them know what he thought.” If Mutombo’s staggering stature didn’t draw attention to himself, his raspy voice did. Nuggets fans in the gym would flock to him for autographs. “He would say, ‘I’m here to see my little sister play basketball,’” Buckner recalled.
As he grew famous for his finger-wag that he used to intimidate opponents after blocking their shots, the Buckners kept him humble. One day when he called Janet to let her know he was coming over for dinner, she asked him to stop at the grocery store and pick up orange juice on his way. “Janet, I’m a star,” Mutombo protested, in a tone that almost mocked his own self-aggrandizement. “You want me to go to Safeway?” Then he laughed — “He would just laugh with that deep laugh,” Buckner remembers — and showed up at the house with a carton of orange juice.
He kept them humble, as well. As John’s hair grayed, Mutombo teased him by constantly offering to buy him the “Just For Men” hair-color restoration product at the store. “I think sometimes he would ask me questions just to see what my response would be,” Janet said. When Overland renamed its gym in honor of John in 2008, Mutombo traveled back to Denver for the ceremony and told him, “I can’t believe you don’t play basketball and I do, and they’re naming a gymnasium after you.”
Mutombo brought his parents to meet the Buckners during their first visit to Denver from the Congo. The Buckners helped teach his eventual wife, Rose, how to drive. They attended the wedding. After his five-season stint with the Nuggets ended, he returned to town for the family’s special occasions, including graduation for Janet and John’s son.
They mourned when Mutombo’s mother died from a stroke in 1998, unable to leave her home because of a government-imposed curfew and unable to have medical help brought to her because there was no ambulance system. They watched as Mutombo achieved his bittersweet dream in 2006 when his funding helped open the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital and Research Center — named after his mother. And as he later funded a $4 million school in the Congo, named after his late father, who was a school principal.
Atlanta Hawks’ Dikembe Mutombo greets children after accepting a check from Miami International Aid, a group of Miami Dade Aviation Department employees, Friday, Sept.15, 2000, at Miami International Airport. The group gave the Atlanta Hawks star the check to help his foundation build a 300-bed hospital in his home country. (AP Photo/Ed Cox)
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Mutombo mourned when John Buckner died in 2015 after a brief illness. Mutombo had recently been announced as a Naismith Hall of Fame inductee, and he’d been hoping John would attend his induction ceremony later that year. When he flew to Denver for the funeral, he stopped by the Buckner household every day to spend time with Janet. “He said, ‘That’s what we do in Africa,’” Janet recalled. “When someone dies, you all gather together.”
As she mourned Mutombo this week, she sought comfort by remembering the early days of their friendship, when he wanted to find a second family in Denver, and the chances they had to see each other later in life. Those chances grew fewer over the years. But he still FaceTimed her on Mother’s Day this spring.
She didn’t have any expectation of him to call. But she didn’t expect him to call after that first night, either. And he always did.
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