“I just want to be remembered as one of the best defensive players to ever play the game,” Dikembo Mutombo said when he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015. Mutombo died yesterday at the age of 58 from brain cancer, achieving that and much more. He will be remembered not only for his athletic career, but also as the NBA's first global ambassador for basketball and as an advocate for health care and education in his native Democratic Republic of Congo, where he founded a hospital that opened in 2007. “Playing basketball has enabled me to become a global citizen,” Mutombo said in his introductory speech. “My mission in life is to continue to change the living conditions of people in Africa.”

Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo was born in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and came to the United States to study in 1987 on an academic scholarship. It wasn't until his second year at Georgetown University, where he majored in linguistics and diplomacy, that the 7-foot-11 Mutombo joined the basketball team. He later said that legendary Hoya coach John Thompson, who recruited him, taught him “how to be a man in this society.” Mutombo was drafted into the NBA in 1991. He didn't wait until his retirement to use his new platform to help others. In 1993, as a spokesman for the international aid organization CARE, he visited Somali refugee camps in northern Kenya and in 1997 founded the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve the health, education and quality of life of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Read: “In the House of Mutombo, Man Cannot Fly”

In 2009, after 18 years in the NBA, Mutombo retired from the Houston Rockets and joined the board of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that I now lead and where he served until his death. He accepted the invitation of President Bill Clinton, then chairman, and traveled to meetings at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the George W. Bush Library in Dallas. I got to know him as our most famous star. He was physically impossible to miss, and when I went to board meetings with him, I was struck by how many people stopped him on the street and asked for selfies, often mimicking the signature finger wag he uses on the court after the blockade had shots from the opponents. Mutombo was always courteous, taking the time to sign every autograph and smiling for every photo.

Mutombo chose to serve the National Constitution Center for 15 years because he was grateful for the citizenship opportunities the Constitution afforded him. On Constitution Day, September 17, 2008, he came to the center to address new citizens at a naturalization ceremony and gave a moving account of why he was a champion of the American idea:

These are, of course, familiar ideas: America welcomes immigrants; With freedom comes the obligation to help others. But they are also ideas that Americans find difficult to live up to. Dikembe Mutombo never did.