The NBA Player Donating All His Salary To Build a Hospital
Bismack Biyombo is honoring his father's legacy by investing in the Congo.
On the night of the 2011 NBA Draft, moments after Bismack Biyombo waltzed across the stage as the seventh overall pick, the 6’8” center with a 7’6” wingspan picked up the phone to call home. His father, François, was on the other line, and he was speechless. All his son could hear on the other line was muffled crying. While raising his eldest son in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, François showed his son videos of Karl Malone and Hakeem Olajuwon and nurtered Biyombo’s hoop dreams by saving up to send him to tournaments and camps. But it wasn’t just opportunity that François provided; he also served as a powerful role model. François and Biyombo’s mother had a home full of seven children, but every time there was extra food after a rowdy dinner, they’d give it to neighbors who were in need.
It's a message that Biyombo never forgot as he transformed from rookie to NBA journeyman, earning over $86 million in salary. He frequently returned home to the Congo, following his father’s lead in providing both opportunity and an example for youth across the country. And throughout the season, Biyombo’s phone would light up moments before he took the court; it was the middle of the night in the Congo, but François was still watching. He wanted his son to know how proud he was.
But in 2020, François got sick. Biyombo stepped away from the court and traveled across the Atlantic to be by his side. The local hospitals in the Congo didn’t have the necessary equipment to treat François, so Biyombo had no choice but to fly his father to Europe for better care. “I asked myself, in my mind, ‘I have the means to do this for my dad, but how about these other people?’” Biyombo told Yahoo! Sports. “There were people that were just there hopeless.”
François died, and when Biyombo tried to return to basketball, he found that he struggled to have the same interest that he did before. “He was my everything,” Biyombo remembered. “He was my friend, my business partner, my mentor. Everything.” He sat out the entire 2020-2021 season and decided that if he was going to return, simply playing basketball wasn’t going to be enough. He needed to, in his words, “play for something.” He needed to find a way to honor his father’s legacy. "I wanted to make this year about my Dad because my Dad spent most of his life making his life about me, my brothers, my sisters and servicing people,” Biyombo explained.
One day in January, Biyombo called his agent and told him he had an idea; he was ready to play again.
Soon, the Phoenix Suns offered a $1.3 million contract. Only, that money wasn’t going straight to his bank account: Biyombo had decided to donate the entirety of his annual salary to build a state-of-the-art hospital in the Congo.
Biyombo has already built two schools in the country, where 70% of people live on less than $1.90 a day, and he has plans to build a third. He’s funded scholarships for 5,000 students. He’s built basketball courts and gyms, and at the height of the pandemic, he donated $1 million of PPE to Congolese medical workers.
But the hospital, which will be named after François, is the most ambitious of all Biyombo’s plans, and it perhaps best sums up his philosophy that, “Opportunities are made to be multiplied.” As Biyombo explains, “Once my dad passed, I realized that we think we have so much time to live on Earth, but we don’t. I’m trying to squeeze all this time I have to make sure that the day God calls me, I’d have made an impact and left this world a better place than I found it.”
Biyombo is hoping to win a championship with the Suns later this year and then fly back for the groundbreaking ceremony with a trophy in hand. With the Suns, he’s wearing number 18, a nod to his dad’s birthday, and in his first month back, he scored 17 points and snagged 14 rebounds in a game against the Spurs.
Maybe it helps to play for something bigger than yourself.
You can learn more about Biyombo’s mission and donate here.
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