Charlotte Hornets center Bismack Biyombo can’t find a moment alone in his own home these day.
He finds that wonderful.
He had six siblings scattered around the United States at various schools, and when the pandemic struck, he brought them all to Charlotte to live together.
“Really, the first time I’ve spent a straight six weeks with my family — getting to see them every single day,” said Biyombo, whose three brothers and three sisters range in age from 25 to 15.
Biyombo, 27, is in his ninth NBA season. He left his home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at 17 to start playing professionally in Spain and now pays for his siblings to be educated in the United States.
Their education these days is different than what he grew up with. Biyombo tells family stories the youngest ones siblings never heard: How he and his brothers sometimes walked to school without shoes. How the family sometimes missed meals for a lack of food. Uncles and cousins occasionally filled his parents’ home because they had nowhere else to sleep.
“I want them growing up appreciating how much they have,” Biyombo said in an interview with the Observer on Friday.
Biyombo, with NBA earnings of more than $75 million, stresses charity and sharing hope. As part of his foundation’s effort to improve medical care in the Congo, he recently shipped $1 million in supplies to his native country. Largely protective gear for doctors and nurses, including Hazardous Material suits equipped with oxygen tanks. But also incubators for the newborn and wheelchairs for the infirm.
He’s looking to help head off a possible COVID-19 outbreak in an area that once was devastated by Ebola. Biyombo said it’s unrealistic, in the way many must live in the Congo, to invoke a stay-at-home order to limit infection spread.
“A lot of people live there (on day-to-day subsistence income). It’s hard for me to send a video motivating people to stay at home,” Biyombo said.
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When he was in his teens, Biyombo’s friends told him he sounded crazy thinking he could make it to the NBA. Three years later, he was the seventh overall pick in the 2012 draft, selected ahead of Hornets all-time leading scorer Kemba Walker.
Biyombo believes in this time of worldwide fear, it’s essential that people maintain hope for something better. Then, act on that, instead of treating the pandemic as an excuse to mope around wasting time.
“You’ve got to do something during this time to better yourselves,” Biyombo said. “It’s great to play video games, but try maybe to spend a little bit of time reading certain books. Educate yourself on what is out there.
“You’ll either come out of this a better person, with a better understanding of the situation, or you’ll come out worse.”
When the NBA first stopped its season March 11, later closing training facilities, Biyombo made it his mental and physical challenge to outwork the problem. No weight room? Do 240 cowbell snatches. No basketball court? Ride a bike for an hour daily for cardio.
He loves that Hornets director of rehabilitation Powell Bernhardt keeps devising ways to shake up workouts with limited equipment.
“I try to exhaust myself during those workouts,” Biyombo said. “He always finds different challenges each week to keep me engaged as a competitor.”
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Monday, the NBA announced a tentative first step back for the players; May 8 (subject to state laws and with the potential to push back), teams can start opening facilities for players to work out. There will be no scrimmaging and no working with coaches, but at least players could start using weight rooms, training rooms and shoot on courts.
Biyombo, a vice president of the players association, participates in frequent conference calls, but that doesn’t mean he has an inkling when the season could resume.
“That’s Mission Impossible,” Biyombo said, adding that while it would be awful if the NBA couldn’t at least hold playoffs, nothing supersedes player safety in a sport with one ball, and players constantly sweating and, sometimes, bleeding on each other.
“We use sports to bring people together,” he said “I hope now, we use sports to keep people safe.”
Whenever the season concludes, Biyombo becomes a free agent. When he first returned to Charlotte via trade in the fall of 2018, he was so extraneous he sometimes wasn’t on the active roster.
Now, he’s a part-time starter who has drawn praise from general manager Mitch Kupchak. He’s taken to being a mentor to a young roster in rebuild.
When the NBA paused the season, the Hornets were on a high, beating playoff teams Toronto, Houston and Miami. He’d like to stick around to see this through.
“We went from a team that wasn’t going to win seven or 10 games to a team that had to be taken seriously,” Biyombo said.
“You have agents for a reason, but it’s been so fun for me to be with these young guys.”
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