How Antonio Gates made the Hall of Fame without

CANTON, Ohio — What Antonio Gates did as a Chargers tight finish was outstanding.

But what he didn’t do was just as spectacular.

Gates, who will probably be enshrined Saturday in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, is the only participant to attain that pinnacle without a single snap of faculty soccer. He was a basketball star at Kent State, a half-hour up the street from Canton, Ohio, and never appeared to give soccer a second thought, even though he was a two-sport high faculty phenom in his hometown of Detroit.

“I never in a million years when he was playing basketball at Kent State thought he would be a professional football player,” stated Steve Sefner, the faculty’s play-by-play announcer when the 6-foot-4 energy ahead was routinely dominating taller opponents.

“Tone” was his nickname. Tone was what he set.

“He had an elite first step, point-guard skills, making reads, passing,” recalled Anthony Wilkins, now a basketball assistant coach at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and then Kent State’s co-captain with Gates. “We could put the ball in Tone’s hands and literally run the offense through him.”

Considering how polished he was as an NFL participant, it’s mind-boggling he achieved what he did without the follow and polish of faculty soccer. It’s price noting that not everybody with a bronze bust had a distinguished faculty profession.

Old-timey Cleveland finish Dante Lavelli, nicknamed “Gluefingers,” performed only three video games at Ohio State, and kicker Jan Stenerud was a aggressive skier who only performed in his senior yr at Montana State. Another one-and-done was cornerback Dick “Night Train” Lane, who only performed a single season at Scottsbluff Junior College in Nebraska.

Inductees Tim Mara and Joe Carr didn’t play faculty soccer, but Mara was the founding proprietor of the New York Giants and Carr was president of the NFL for 19 seasons in the Nineteen Twenties and ‘30s.

But Gates played in an era when making an NFL roster meant devoting virtually every waking hour to becoming a better football player.

That said, football wasn’t unfamiliar to Gates. He was an excellent linebacker at Detroit Central High and one of the state’s high tight finish prospects. Basketball was his first love, but his soccer prowess was plain.

“Football was something I did so natural, I never really cared,” he instructed ESPN in 2010. “I stepped foot on the football field, and it was like, `That’s the best player.’ It was one of those things that was so natural that I didn’t go to practice. I didn’t do the offseason stuff, and I would walk out and catch the first two or three [passes] and take it to the house. And it was like, ‘Wow, and he missed all those days — just imagine if he applied himself.’

“And that’s where the football thing started rolling. I was like, ‘Whatever.’ I was in the gym, shooting basketballs every day, working on my game.”

Not surprisingly, he received all varieties of scholarship affords from top-notch soccer packages but only nibbles from big-time basketball colleges. Most of that curiosity got here from mid-majors. A dream offer did come collectively, however. Nick Saban recruited him to play soccer at Michigan State, and Tom Izzo had a spot for him on the basketball workforce. Gates dedicated to the Spartans in 1997.

Gates arrived on campus in the summer time of ’98 as a Prop 48 tutorial qualifier, that means he initially had to sit out of competitors. He had some challenges in the classroom in his first semester, main to Saban rescinding his permission to let Gates play basketball in addition to soccer. Gates stated he felt blindsided by that and wound up leaving the faculty.

He wound up transferring to Eastern Michigan to play basketball in the Mid-American Conference but failed to focus enough on the classroom. That led to him leaving for a neighborhood faculty in California, particularly College of the Sequoias in Visalia, with the objective of getting some good grades under his belt.

All that paved his path to Kent State, where he made an impression the second he stepped onto campus.

“He had a pair of Cartier glasses, that Detroit swag and a confidence,” Wilkins stated. “He carried himself like, ‘This isn’t too big for me.’”

Chargers tight finish Antonio Gates, proper, runs after making a catch against the Arizona Cardinals in November 2018.

(Kelvin Kuo / Associated Press)

And the stage wasn’t too large. He sometimes was the best participant on the court.

“Man, I’d just get caught watching him,” stated teammate Deandre Haynes, a former Kent State level guard and now a Marquette assistant. “He could cross you up, dunk on you, shoot the three, everything.”

Haynes was 4 years youthful but also grew up in Detroit, so he knew all about Gates the high faculty soccer star.

“He actually put my brother in the hospital, he hit him so hard,” Haynes stated. “Tone cracked him. He used to punish people in high school.”

All that appeared like a distant reminiscence when Gates determined to exit for spring soccer at Kent State and lasted… at some point.

Recalled Kent State basketball teammate Eric Haut: “He came back after one practice saying, ‘Man, I hate football.’”

Haut, now an assistant coach at Utah State, often finds himself telling his gamers about Gates.

“He was one of the best teammates I ever played with,” Haut stated. “Everybody knew Tone was a step above the rest of us, but he never acted that way.”

It wasn’t unusual for NFL scouts to show up at his basketball video games. Gates still held out NBA hopes, but he was a tweener at that measurement, too small to play ahead at the next stage. He suffered a sprained ankle in the pre-draft course of, dimming any bit of highlight he commanded.

The results of that sprained ankle lingered when he tried out for a couple of NFL scouts. (He hadn’t been invited to the mix.) One of those evaluators was Tim Brewster of the San Diego Chargers, who knew about the ankle issues so he didn’t put a lot of stock in Gates’ plodding, 4.8-second 40-yard sprint.

Antonio Gates holds up a custom-made Chargers jacket as he’s inducted into the Chargers Hall of Fame during a halftime ceremony at SoFi Stadium on Dec. 10, 2023.

(Ryan Sun / Associated Press)

No one chosen Gates in the draft, but the Chargers gave him a $7,000 bonus to signal as a rookie free agent. That set in movement one of the NFL’s unlikeliest tales.

He caught 116 landing passes, the most by any tight finish in league historical past.

“Being a competitor means putting your best on the line with no guarantees, and Tone embodied that,” Wilkins stated.

“I told him when he got in [the Hall of Fame]: ‘The greatest blessing I’ve had has been seeing life through your eyes. And you deserve every bit of it.’”