Former Atlanta Hawks center Dikembe Mutombo’s All-Star weekend trash talk came back to haunt him during the 1997 NBA Playoffs, as Michael Jordan famously threw down a one-handed dunk on his dome.
Mount Mutombo claims that MJ’s jam doesn’t count as a true posterization.
”No, no, he didn’t dunk on me. I never look at that dunk as really being dunked on. Because being dunked on is someone coming ahead of you, looking at your eye and climb over you and pop one dunk. But Michael really didn’t do it…When somebody just sneak one behind you, you might giving [them] credit but it’s not going to be A+. It might be a B.”
In a conversation with Graham Bensinger, Dikembe also discusses his trademark finger wag after blocking shots, and his disappointment with fellow NBA players when it comes to supporting his charitable work in Africa:
Mutombo raised $40 million to build and launch the Biamba Marie Mutombo hospital, but was surprised when very little of those donations came from fellow NBA players.
“I think it was hard because I think I made a mistake in the end. I was a professional basketball player making million dollars a year and I felt at the beginning that maybe if I gave a couple million and announced to them, ‘Well, I’m building a hospital,’ the rest of the NBA players was just going to be walking at the door and giving me the checks. I was wrong.”
