‘Gold standard’: Why Mizzou’s Dennis Gates is driven to become a Hall of Fame coach
During a July interview in his office, new University of Missouri men’s basketball coach Dennis Gates spoke about why he loves fishing and the haven he finds in … laundromats. And why you’ll never hear him say he’s tired.
He talked about being a child sneaking into Chicago Stadium to see Michael Jordan play from obstructed views in the rafters — and how that led to his notebooks diagramming the triangle offense and preparing for the NBA Draft as if he were a general manager.
He described how the crossroads of his youth make him what he calls “a walking billboard” for recruiting many with similar experiences.
And he elaborated on the pattern in his life of seizing opportunity, whether at UC Berkeley seeking immediately to be the team captain … or annoying teenage teammates by telling them what to do (correctly) … or eagerly taking on a job at Cleveland State that looked hopeless from the outside.
Maybe all of that helps explain why the man once nicknamed “The Sheriff” (because he was always so serious) matter-of-factly paused to say, “And I’ll be a Hall of Fame coach.”
The statement wasn’t thumping his own chest so much as a matter of tribute and duty to all who’ve helped him get to this point: from loving family to the essential influence of coaches who became his compass and fueled his imagination and still see no ceiling for him.
Who he’s become is why Larry Butler, the longtime Illinois Warriors AAU coach who mentored Gates among a galaxy of stars, reckons no one should be surprised to see Gates take Mizzou to a Final Four.
“Because he’s golden,” Butler said. “Some people … when they touch things, they turn it into a gold standard. Some people just have that. (Kansas coach) Bill Self has that. Some people just have that magical feel for things. And Coach has that. He’s always had that. Always.”
In ways that make it hard to think he won’t succeed at MU.
‘The Tie That Binds’
That day in his office, Gates began talking about his “GPS” for winning championships: core values of friendship, love, accountability, trust, discipline, unselfishness, enthusiasm and toughness.
Next thing you know, he’s talking about how friendship is the “thread that holds every relationship together.” and a book he cherishes called “The Tie That Binds” by Herman Dreer — a Black educator, journalist and minister in St. Louis who dedicated much of his life to integration and race relations.
He took out his phone and called up the “rare book that I have,” which then as now was available for $879.95 via Amazon.com. When I asked why it meant so much to him, this is what he said:
“I look at myself as a lifelong learner. I look at myself as a connector of people. I look at myself as a young man who comes from the inner city that some coaches and educators along the way built a bridge for. And they built this bridge, and I didn’t know where the bridge would lead. But I knew I had the potential to demand more, want more, than maybe the peers that I grew up with. They saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. …
“This is why I don’t take some young man calling me ‘Coach’ lightly. “
In his case, those coaches and other educators taught him not just how to dream but how to protect the dream and fight for it.
“They literally, I would say, saved my life,” said Gates, 42, entering his first season at Missouri after three at Cleveland State.
‘We’ve got candles’
Before we turn to the ways they did that, understand that Gates enjoys enormous inspiration from his family.
He drew that from his parents, Dennis and Shirley, respectively a truck driver and a registered nurse. And he certainly took it from his maternal grandmother, Lee Alice Goines, who moved her family to Chicago from the South for a better life after picking cotton in Mississippi for a dollar a day.
It was with his grandmother that he developed a love for fishing … despite that time he got a bone stuck in his throat and she saved him by applying sopped-up bread down his gullet.
It was through his grandmother, who worked on a factory assembly line for some 40 years, that he learned never to say “I’m tired,” and that no one else could dictate, “This is your limit.” And how to stretch a dollar at the laundromat.
“That’s why I still go to this day,” he said. “Just to sit and think. I still do that. I swear. It’s peace.”
(Asked if he’d found any such spot in Columbia, Gates laughed and said, “I can’t give that up.”)
It also was because of his grandmother’s experiences with segregation that he developed a curiosity about racial issues that informed his perspective (including why he wanted the job at Cleveland State, to which we’ll come back).
Between her resolve and that of his parents, he came to grow up with this mindset when resources were sparse:
“If there’s no heat, open up the stove, let’s get it. If the lights are off, we’ve got candles.”
The Sheriff
But those weren’t the only lights in his life after he became enamored of basketball playing daily after school in Garfield Park.
From George Friel, his first coach, to Leonard Hamilton, his last boss (for whom he was an assistant coach), Gates remains grateful for, and entwined with, them all.
So much so that as Gates spoke of each coach, he called to try to get them on speaker phone.
The first of those calls was to Friel, his junior high coach who answered while giving a drivers-education test and could be heard saying “back up” and “turn left” before telling Gates he’d call right back.
“There you have it: always coaching,” Gates said, laughing.
Waiting briefly for the callback, Gates explained that Friel had given him stability when his parents had separated. And that as a white man with a Black wife, he taught by example something important about possibilities and reconciling the racial divide.
“I was this young man who was in a fragile stage, who could go left or could go right and make a bad decision,” Gates said. “Now, I tried (to make bad decisions). I tried. Because sometimes bad decisions were cool, right? Or at least that’s what the bad peers would sort of make you feel like. And he (Friel) always steered me in the right direction, like he’s steering this person trying to get his driver’s license right now, right?”
A moment later, Friel called back. He talked about how he had a rule: You can pick your basketball family or the one on the streets. But if you pick the other one, you can’t be here. Gates chose basketball and had the sway to make others do the same.
That was part of how he was unique from the start, with the sort of game and presence that immediately made him the guy teammates turned to in the crunch. And perhaps portended his future as a coach.
“I’ll say it this way: He already was a coach,” Friel said, adding, “Before I could even (make corrections), he’d say, ‘Get over there. You’re running the motion wrong. Go set that pick.’ ”
Next up was Butler, the former AAU coach. He brought up “The Sheriff” nickname. With a laugh, he recalled Gates’ friend and former teammate Quentin Richardson saying, “The Sheriff is just too serious.”
“There was always a sense of urgency about him,” said Butler, who recalled taking Gates to see college games and how even then he was drawing up plays.
Then there was George Stanton, Gates’ coach at Whitney Young High, where Gates, Richardson (later a No. 1 draft pick in the NBA) and Cordell Henry (soon to be a Marquette star) and others won the 1998 Illinois Class AA championship.
“He pretty much always knew what he wanted to do, and he was willing to do what it took to do it,” Stanton said. “He was very serious about whatever he did: grades, basketball, team. Very serious about all of it. I saw him as a natural leader, because that’s just what he did.”
When teammates griped about Gates telling them what to do, Stanton recalled with a laugh, he said: “Well, is he telling you wrong?”
Well, no. So Stanton responded, “Then what’s the problem?”
“‘He’s not the coach,’” he’d hear.
To which Stanton said, “Well, he could be.”
The ‘it’ factor
By the time Gates arrived at Berkeley, he was preparing to be a coach. He completed his bachelor’s degree in three years and played a fourth while working toward his master’s in education.
Not to mention working various jobs through school so he could send money home to his family. That’s part of his appreciation for the opportunities today’s collegiate athletes have to make money through name, image and likeness deals.
“That’s my gift,” said Gates, who was a noted factor in four straight top 15 recruiting classes as a Florida State assistant and has rejuvenated Mizzou’s efforts. “Because they feel so connected to me and I can talk about that. … I can talk about the realities but also give them firsthand the path to get out of it …
“Same family structures, same broken homes, same impoverished communities. Trying to make it.”
As he began trying to make it in coaching, other coaches and mentors entered his life.
Ben Braun, his coach at UC Berkeley, gave him his first full-time coaching job in 2005 at his alma mater. He became a mentee of George Raveling, the former Washington State and Iowa coach with vast reach and influence through his work with Nike and as a broadcaster.
That helped pave the way to working for Leonard Hamilton at Florida State, where Gates became a renowned recruiter and earned a vital relationship with Hamilton working for him from 2011-19.
He’ll tell you he hasn’t made a move since that wasn’t approved by Hamilton — whom Gates can call at any hour of the night and typically be told, “Man, I was just waiting on your call.”
As it happened, Hamilton wasn’t immediately available that day from Gates’ office. But he called days later and described what he believes makes Gates “born to coach.”
First, he compared Gates’ persona to what he’d seen in Barack Obama even before Obama was elected president. Like Butler, he compared Gates to Self, who was an assistant to Hamilton at Oklahoma State.
“They have the it factor that sometimes you can’t really explain what the it is,” Hamilton said. “But he has that it factor.”
More specifically, Hamilton pointed to Gates’ exceptional communications skills, comfort with who he is and an unflappable way that comes with someone he says is always thinking.
“The more pressure situation he gets in, the calmer he becomes,” he said. “So very seldom will you ever see him get rattled.”
‘I can build it for them’
Certainly, Gates didn’t get rattled when the Cleveland State job came open in July 2019. Never mind friends telling him he’d be committing career suicide taking over a program in disarray — where he’d have to basically assemble a team in weeks.
Gates saw the chance to emulate John McClendon — the Hall of Fame coach who in 1966 became the first Black men’s basketball coach at a predominantly white institution.
That was just one of many ways McClendon influenced the game. But his impact on Hamilton and Raveling extended to Gates, who relished the chance to “walk the same sidelines as McClendon.”
Gates became a two-time Horizon League coach of the year and went 31-10 in conference play the last two seasons, leading to his becoming Mizzou’s choice after Cuonzo Martin was dismissed in the spring.
Thanks to all who walked the sidelines of his life … and made him want to do the same for others.
“I can build a bridge that was built for me,” he said. “I can build it for them.”