COLOMBIA, Missouri. Twenty-five years ago, Dennis Gates was full of surprises during his recruiting visit to the Bay Area.
Gates, one of several Division I prospects on his powerful high school team in Chicago, was in Berkeley, California visiting the UC campus when, on his second day there, coach Ben Brown asked at breakfast if Gates was ready to join the Golden Bears. .
“Go read the paper,” he told Brown.
Brown was confused, but went and found the Oakland Tribune of that day. There, in the sports section, was Cal’s beat writer Jeff Faraudo’s byline under the headline: “Dennis Gates Commits to Cal.”
Gates lashed out at his future coach, future boss, and future publicist.
“I said, Dennis, that I should be mad at you for not telling me, but I can’t. I’m happy. You made a great decision,” Brown recalled in a phone interview Monday. “Now don’t put that shit on me anymore.”
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If Brown is not the president of the Dennis Gates fan club, he is at least a senior member of the cabinet. He makes no apologies for his attachment to his 42-year-old former player. He’s known Gates since his freshman year in high school and knew early in his college career that he would make a great coach one day.
Gates will get that chance in Missouri while awaiting approval from the UM System Board of Curators, which meets at 7 a.m. Tuesday via Zoom for a closed executive session. Gates, who has been Cleveland State’s head coach for the past three seasons, flew from Cleveland to Columbia on Monday and could be officially unveiled as the new Missouri coach Tuesday afternoon, pending pending board approval.
Someone just landed in Columbia from Cleveland 👀 pic.twitter.com/SQOkRUW7NF
— Dave Matter (@Dave_Matter) March 21, 2022
Who exactly is Missouri hiring from the 42-year-old Chicago native? Brown began to understand his future player more during that recruiting visit, when Gates clarified one thing.
“He didn’t ask a lot of questions,” said Brown, who won 219 games in California from 1996 to 2008. “He didn’t say, ‘Can I play right now? Can I start right now? He said: “Do I have a chance to become a captain? Can I be the leader? And I said, “Yes, Dennis. We are always looking for leaders.” This was his greatest interest. He wanted to be a leader in our program.”
The bears needed some of them. At the time, Cal’s program did not have a home arena and was about to absorb NCAA sanctions for violations that had occurred in the previous training regimen.
“We literally didn’t have a locker room, practice room, and home gym,” Brown said. “Every day we took the bus to the Warriors Stadium (Golden State). Children in backpacks had a travel locker room.”
On the court, Brown’s program needed stability and a unifying voice. Gates provided both instantly, guiding Cal to the NIT Championship as a freshman and then into the NCAA Tournament as a junior and senior.
Since then, he has coached in the NBA and six college programs, but Gates is returning to his core college rookie ambitions that define his basketball personality. He traces these roots back to his coach at Chicago’s Whitney Young School, George Stanton.
“He told me, ‘One day you’ll be a great coach,'” Gates said in a 2020 interview with the Bleav in All Ball Chicago podcast about famous Windy City basketball players. “I went where I was allowed to be a freshman captain.”
Long before Berkeley, Dennis Ray Gates II grew up on the West Side of Chicago, the son of Dennis and Shirley Gates, a truck driver and registered nurse who both graduated from Malcolm X College in Chicago. Every day after classes at Daniel Webster Elementary School, he would go to Garfield Park with his friends and play the game he loved.
“At a very young age, my dad, my mom, my uncles put a basketball in my hand and it just acted as a compass to guide my life and get me to where I am today,” he said in a 2020 interview. . “And without it, I don’t know where I would be.”
As teenagers, Gates and best friends Quentin Richardson and Cordell Henry promised each other that they would go to college together at Marquette—they played for both the AAU Illinois Warriors and Whitney Young—but Marquette withdrew his offer to Gates, as he recalled in podcast. Instead, only Henry played for Marquette while Richardson moved to DePaul and Gates headed west.
In California, Gates started 34 games in four years, averaging 5.6 points per game as a senior shooting guard but excelling defensively.
“He really was a quarantine advocate,” Brown said. “He always wanted to go out and protect the best player on the other team. He did this throughout his career until Eddie House (Arizona State) put us on 61 (in 2000) to set the Pac-10 record.”
“But,” Brown said, laughing, “Dennis claims he only had 30 on Dennis.”
Brown’s favorite story about Gates comes from another Arizona game. At the end of the second half, Cal received free throws for a technical foul. Brown told Gates to take the decisive penalties.
“He says, ‘No, coach. You have Ryan Forehan-Kelly sitting on the bench. He shoots much better from free throws. You have to put him in his place,” said Brown, who did just that as he watched Forean-Kelly take the win from the line. “Then Dennis coached the team – and at his own expense. How about this?”
Gates had several NBA tryouts after college, but a torn ankle ligament kept him out of the league. Trying to plan his next moves, Gates was once in Los Angeles picking up Richardson, now with the Clippers and two seasons into his 13-year NBA career. Clippers assistant Dennis Johnson took a liking to the 22-year-old Gates and created a position as player development coach for him. The following summer, while working at the Michael Jordan youth camp in Santa Barbara, California, Gates became close to camp director George Raveling, who later put Gates in touch with Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton. Gates returned to California for a couple of seasons as Brown’s assistant coach, along with stops in Marquette, Northern Illinois, Nevada, and then worked alongside Hamilton for eight years in the former Soviet Union, where he earned a reputation as one of the best in the country. young helpers.
“I still don’t remember the day he hired me or how much he paid me,” Gates said in a 2020 interview. “He just said, ‘Pack your bags. Get on the plane. And here I am in Florida for (eight) years, man. He blessed me. He showed me how to balance being a successful head coach with being a husband, being a great father and obviously getting into the lives of these young people, hugging them, building a bridge and making sure you coach them not only in basketball but also teach them the nuances of life to help them overcome obstacles.”
Having turned Cleveland State into a two-time Horizon League regular season champion in just three years, Gates is now ready to take on a new challenge at Mizza, where, coincidentally, he is replacing another coach who considers Hamilton his mentor, Cuonzo. Martin fired earlier this month after the Tigers’ 12-21 season.
“I’m very happy for Dennis that he has this opportunity,” Brown said. “But I’m also happy for Missouri. I wish Cuonzo got a little more time and I’m not sure they gave him as much time as he should have. You can quote me on this. I felt that Cuonzo could start all over again, as he did at the beginning. But at the same time, I understand this business and people are not as patient as they used to be.”
Dave Matter brings you the latest updates from the Mizzou sports scene.