The N.B.A. All-Star Game was first played in 1951. Back then, it was a gimmick, and a single game. Now it’s a multi-event circus that takes place over a long weekend. It came to New Orleans for the first time in 2008. All-Stars bearing hammers, nails, and paint went out into the neighborhoods in teams to help rebuild a city still reeling from Hurricane Katrina. “It wasn’t that clear the city would come back at the time,” Arnie Fielkow, who nows runs the retired N.B.A. players’ association, said. He made the remark this past Wednesday on a panel filled mostly with lawyers who now work in marketing in the N.B.A. He had been a vice-president with the New Orleans Saints in 2005. The Superdome was in shambles. The Saints had relocated to San Antonio, Texas, for the season. Tom Benson, the team’s owner, seemed to be mulling making the relocation permanent. Fielkow spoke out forcefully against this, after which he was fired. He didn’t take a settlement and sign a non-disclosure agreement but, rather, spoke out some more, and sufficiently endeared himself to the city that he was elected to a couple of terms as president of the City Council.
That gesture of rebuilding and community engagement in 2008 is now an official part of the All-Star weekend experience with its own title: “N.B.A. Cares All-Star Day of Service.” It has been part of every All-Star Weekend in every city since—including New Orleans, again, in 2014. This year’s game was supposed to happen in Charlotte, North Carolina, but after the state passed legislation that weakened anti-discrimination laws, the N.B.A. decided to relocate. Like a traveller indignantly storming out of a hotel only to realize they are in need of a room, the league had to make arrangements on the fly. They came back to New Orleans.
In 2014, the All-Star Weekend overlapped with a full moon and Valentine’s Day. This time, it overlaps with the first weekend of Mardi Gras. In 2014, seventeen hotels were able to accommodate the N.B.A. contingent. This time they needed thirty-eight, a reflection of the busy time of the year, but also of the way that the event has continued to grow in scale.
“It’s nice to be in a city that knows how to throw an event,” an N.B.A. employee said. “But it is also small enough to make it feel like a big event. Have you seen downtown?” I had. Many of the office buildings of downtown have been dressed, as though for a costume party with a political theme, by Nike. There is an enormous, ghostly image of Anthony Davis’s face draped over thirty or forty stories of the Benson Building. It faces the Superdome and the Smoothie King Arena. Beneath the face is the word “Equality.”
The person I most wanted to see this weekend was Dikembe Mutombo . I had spent time with him during All-Star Weekend in 2014, and I wanted to get my bearings by seeing him again. He was appearing at a school in New Orleans East, where a tornado had struck early last week. It was a chilly, brisk morning. The last time I had ventured out to New Orleans East was several years ago to visit a tiny community settled by Vietnamese refugees. Now I wound my way past the low brick houses under the bright sun. Many of them had blue tarp on their roofs. There were tidy piles of debris on the curbs—tree branches, torn-up fencing, a pile of mattresses. I was in a hurry to see Mutombo but came to a stop in front of a house whose entire roof had been torn off. It wasn’t the missing roof that got my attention but, rather, the haunting X-code that had been spray-painted on the front of the house, next to the front door—an all too familiar image.
When I arrived in New Orleans, a few years after Katrina, they were still everywhere—runic and slightly biblical, a circle within which was an “X,” mysterious hieroglyphics in each quadrant. When I was told that they were a code to display that the house had been inspected, they only became more haunting—the bottom quadrant, where a numeral would be written, denoted how many bodies had been found inside.
I found Mutombo inside a gym full of screaming middle-school students. They had been divided among the different baskets, each with a different personality guiding the drill. Mutombo is a Global Ambassador, and also a legend. Also present in the gym, conducting a drill, was Gary Payton, an official N.B.A. “legend.” The N.B.A. has as many orders of merit as the British aristocracy.
That I needed to talk to Mutombo in order to measure the time since the last All-Star Game in New Orleans was somewhat ironic, as no one has ever been entirely sure how old he is. To me, he looks pretty much like he did as a player, and exactly as he did when I first met him, in 2014, in the city’s Oschner Hospital, where he was visiting the pediatric ward. We all assembled in a kind of makeshift greenroom in a hallway—the players, the N.B.A. people, the press, hospital employees there for a reason or for kicks. There was a table with fruit slices and snacks.
A woman approached. “Oh, my God, your shoes! What size are you?” she said. Mutombo's smile is huge but his ace is that he has a bit of Buster Keaton in him. He planted his foot beside hers. Photographs were taken to shrieks and laughter. His posture, his stature, his charisma—there is something about Mutombo’s height, the way he carries it so erectly and without apology, and the set of his face, both sombre and, when smiling, explosively joyous, that gives him a king’s demeanor. He seems never to feel ashamed.
“Did you get a new hotel room?” someone asked him. “Yes, I did," he replied. “I have a beautiful suite and a shower the size of a box.” He put his fist on the wall at about the level of his chest to indicate where the showerhead was located. It was unclear if this was an improvement on the old room.
Hospital officials led the players on a walk through the pediatric intensive-care unit. There was a flurry of posed pictures. The first patient we saw was about twelve years old. She brought her hand to her mouth as Mutombo walked in with the other Pelicans in tow, and the cameras. She sat in a chair beside her bed as she was presented with a bouquet of flowers. The interaction had the feeling of an old-style game show, or maybe “Candid Camera.” This went on for a long time. She finally removed her hand from her mouth and said, “Oh, my God, I haven’t done my hair.”
We all went into the next patient’s room. It was shocking, almost like a physical blow. A baby lay on her back. Her skin was mostly obscured by the many tubes and patches and electrodes that had been attached to her, including oxygen into her nose. Mutombo strode in and greeted the four assembled family members. There was a cheerful commotion.
I stayed in the hall and skipped the next room, needing to recover. I saw that the twelve-year-old was having her hair done by a woman I thought was her mother. She was the girl’s nurse, it turned out. Her mother arrived a few minutes later and was upset to have missed it all. She wanted a picture. I told her to go down to the hall and talk to anyone wearing a suit. She did. And Mutombo returned for pictures with the twelve-year-old’s hair properly done.
Then there was a session in the playroom. Children with shaved heads on which there were surgical scars. Children wearing surgical masks. Their parents. The players. The league representatives. And the media, clamorous, still photographs, TV cameras. I stepped outside. A moment later Avery Johnson—the former player, former coach, current legend, and New Orleans native—came out and said, “Can somebody get a doctor? We need a doctor right away.” He winced in that way of his, it could have been a smile, but it seemed like something else.
“What happened?” I said.
“A photographer tripped over a tube and disconnected it from a kid,” Johnson said.
The scene in New Orleans East on Thursday was much more cheerful. There is nothing like the shrieks of middle-school kids pulled from class for a special occasion. All the media, the cameras. I sat with Mutombo, reminded him of our last meeting, asked if he ever gets a shower in a hotel under which he fits.
“It’s terrible,” he said in his distinctive croak, and then laughed. “The beds are worse.”
“It must be hard for you to always be on the front lines of difficult situations, trying to cheer up kids,” I said.
He had been to Baton Rouge on Wednesday, and now New Orleans East. “I grew up poor, you never knew if you had water or electricity, but this. To see this place get hit again . . .”
Back in 2014, at the end of the visit, there was a final group photo. As had been the case all morning, the cameras were a mix of smartphones and proper cameras, the professional journalists and the scrapbooking souvenir collectors blurred in life as they are online. The Pelicans players —Ryan Anderson among them—lined up. So did some of the retired N.B.A. players. Rita Benson, Tom Benson’s granddaughter, who had played a major role in both the Pelicans and Saints management, called out playfully, “Dukumbo! Dukumbo, get over here!” Then she corrected herself. “Dikembe!”
Mutombo came over, all smiles. She put her arm around his waist while his arm extended outward across several shoulders, and there was that glittering again. I moved behind the group while the flashbulbs popped, curious about what was catching the light so ostentatiously. Her soft pale hand rested against his dark-blue jacket at the small of his back. Glistening on one of her fingers, like a tiny disco ball, was a Super Bowl ring.
Now, three years later, I thought of it when I got my press pass at the Superdome and peered up at Anthony Davis’s face covering the Benson Building. Rita and her mother have sued Tom Benson. It’s an ugly dispute involving the usual—a new wife, the terms of a trust, a few hundred million dollars. She isn’t around New Orleans anymore. But I still remember that giant diamond ring
The stars of the All-Star Game are the players, but the gathering is familial, and there are many oldsters around who often provide the most interesting moments. Rick Barry did a panel on Friday with Mike Dunleavy, Sr., now the coach of Tulane University’s men’s basketball team.
I asked what it’s like to have sons in the N.B.A., and why it is that there are now so many progeny of players who also play professionally. Dunleavy went into a litany involving his rookie season, with the 1976 Philadelphia 76ers, whose roster produced numerous NBA children. He had a son, Mike, Jr., who is now in his sixteenth season in the N.B.A. Henry Bibby had a son, Mike Bibby, an All-Star. “A guy named Joe Bryant had a son who was pretty good ,” Dunleavy said. The center Harvey Catchings had twin daughters,; Tauja plays professionally in Sweden, and Tamika was an MVP of the W.N.B.A.
He then talked about how his two sons were ball boys for the Lakers when they were in junior high school, “guys like Magic Johnson and James Worthy taking an interest in them, talking to them about aspects of the game.” But the initial message rang loudest, that the 1976 76ers, which also featured Moses Malone and Dr. J, was a kind of vintage year for athletic basketball D.N.A.
Barry picked up this theme and made it more explicit. He had four sons with a woman whose father had been an N.B.A. star. All played at a high level, two in the N.B.A. His oldest should have been in the N.B.A., he said, but was cut by the Celtics, because back then there were mandatory twelve-man rosters, and the Celtics that year had thirteen players on contract. “Larry Bird and Kevin McHale both told me that my son was better than their first-round draft pick that year. He went on to have a very long career playing in Europe, played till he was forty, but he should have been in the N.B.A.” His youngest son, from a different mother, which was perhaps why he didn’t name his first wife’s illustrious father—is now doing well playing for the University of Florida. His pride was understandable—Who wouldn’t be proud?—but complicated, too.
The elder Dunleavy pointed out that the amount of money to be made playing basketball is such that the children of players have every incentive to work on it. I found this interesting because the biographies of N.B.A. players seem to be splitting into such distinct camps—a fact not lost on the players themselves. On one side, you have people like the Curry brothers, and their many peers, who are the children of N.B.A. players—there are so many familiar names on the backs of players’ jerseys today that watching a game sometimes feel like browsing through vintage records: Nance, Sabonis, Grant, Hardaway, and on. But the prevailing narrative about N.B.A. stars, and part of their appeal, is how incredibly unlikely it should be that they are such financial and cultural smash hits, how far they have come. It is the saintly single mothers, and the corresponding fatherlessness, that is part of the traditional narrative. LeBron James and Kevin Durant being two very conspicuous examples.
