“I just want to be remembered as one of the best defensive players to ever play this game,” Dikembo Mutombo said when he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015. Mutombo, who died yesterday of brain cancer at the age of 58, achieved that and much more. He will be remembered not only for his athletic career, but for being the NBA’s first global ambassador for basketball and a champion for healthcare and education in his home country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he founded a hospital that opened in 2007 . Basketball allowed 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 the 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 sophomore year at Georgetown University, where he studied linguistics and diplomacy, that the 7-foot-2 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 retirement before using his new platform to help others. In 1993 he visited Somali refugee camps in northern Kenya as spokesperson for the international aid organization CARE, and in 1997 he founded the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation to improve the health, education and quality of life of people in the DRC.

Read: ‘Man cannot fly in the house of Mutombo’

In 2009, after eighteen 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 joined at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, who was then chairman, and traveled to attend meetings at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the George W. Bush Library in Dallas. I’ve come to know him as our most recognizable celebrity. He was physically impossible to miss, and as I walked with him to board meetings I was struck by how many people stopped him on the street and asked for selfies, often mimicking the signature finger motion he had used on the field after blocking shots from the opponent. Mutombo was always friendly, taking the time to sign every autograph and smiling with every photo.

Mutombo chose to provide fifteen years of service to the National Constitution Center because he was grateful for the citizenship opportunities the Constitution gave him. On September 17, 2008 – Constitution Day – he came downtown to address new citizens at a naturalization ceremony, and movingly explained 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 have difficulty realizing. Dikembe Mutombo never did that.