CANTON, Ohio — What Antonio Gates did as a Chargers tight end was remarkable.
But what he didn’t do was just as impressive.
Gates, who will be enshrined Saturday in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, is the only player to reach that pinnacle without a single snap of college football. He was a basketball star at Kent State, a half-hour up the road from Canton, Ohio, and never seemed to give football a second thought, even though he was a two-sport high school 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,” said Steve Sefner, the school’s play-by-play announcer when the 6-foot-4 power forward was routinely dominating taller opponents.
Kent State’s Antonio Gates drives over Indiana’s A. J. Moye during the 2002 NCAA tournament.
(Doug Pensinger / Getty Images)
“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 player, it’s mind-boggling he achieved what he did without the practice and polish of college football. It’s worth noting that not everyone with a bronze bust had a distinguished college career.
Old-timey Cleveland end Dante Lavelli, nicknamed “Gluefingers,” played only three games at Ohio State, and kicker Jan Stenerud was a competitive skier who only played in his senior year at Montana State. Another one-and-done was cornerback Dick “Night Train” Lane, who only played a single season at Scottsbluff Junior College in Nebraska.
Inductees Tim Mara and Joe Carr didn’t play college football, but Mara was the founding owner of the New York Giants and Carr was president of the NFL for 19 seasons in the 1920s 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 outstanding linebacker at Detroit Central High and one of the state’s top tight end prospects. Basketball was his first love, but his football prowess was undeniable.
“Football was something I did so natural, I never really cared,” he told 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 got all kinds of scholarship offers from top-notch football programs but only nibbles from big-time basketball schools. Most of that interest came from mid-majors. A dream offer did come together, however. Nick Saban recruited him to play football at Michigan State, and Tom Izzo had a spot for him on the basketball team. Gates committed to the Spartans in 1997.
Gates arrived on campus in the summer of ’98 as a Prop 48 academic qualifier, meaning he initially had to sit out of competition. He had some challenges in the classroom in his first semester, leading to Saban rescinding his permission to let Gates play basketball in addition to football. Gates said he felt blindsided by that and wound up leaving the school.
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 community college in California, specifically College of the Sequoias in Visalia, with the goal of getting some good grades under his belt.
All that paved his path to Kent State, where he made an impression the moment he stepped onto campus.
“He had a pair of Cartier glasses, that Detroit swag and a confidence,” Wilkins said. “He carried himself like, ‘This isn’t too big for me.’”
Chargers tight end Antonio Gates, right, runs after making a catch against the Arizona Cardinals in November 2018.
(Kelvin Kuo / Associated Press)
And the stage wasn’t too big. He typically was the best player on the court.
“Man, I’d just get caught watching him,” said teammate Deandre Haynes, a former Kent State point guard and now a Marquette assistant. “He could cross you up, dunk on you, shoot the three, everything.”
Haynes was four years younger but also grew up in Detroit, so he knew all about Gates the high school football star.
“He actually put my brother in the hospital, he hit him so hard,” Haynes said. “Tone cracked him. He used to punish people in high school.”
All that seemed like a distant memory when Gates decided to go out for spring football at Kent State and lasted… one day.
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, frequently finds himself telling his players about Gates.
“He was one of the best teammates I ever played with,” Haut said. “Everybody knew Tone was a step above the rest of us, but he never acted that way.”
It wasn’t uncommon for NFL scouts to show up at his basketball games. Gates still held out NBA hopes, but he was a tweener at that size, too small to play forward at the next level. He suffered a sprained ankle in the pre-draft process, dimming any bit of spotlight he commanded.
The effects of that sprained ankle lingered when he tried out for a couple of NFL scouts. (He hadn’t been invited to the combine.) One of those evaluators was Tim Brewster of the San Diego Chargers, who knew about the ankle problems so he didn’t put a lot of stock in Gates’ plodding, 4.8-second 40-yard dash.
Antonio Gates holds up a customized Chargers jacket as he is inducted into the Chargers Hall of Fame during a halftime ceremony at SoFi Stadium on Dec. 10, 2023.
(Ryan Sun / Associated Press)
No one selected Gates in the draft, but the Chargers gave him a $7,000 bonus to sign as a rookie free agent. That set in motion one of the NFL’s unlikeliest stories.
He caught 116 touchdown passes, the most by any tight end in league history.
“Being a competitor means putting your best on the line with no guarantees, and Tone embodied that,” Wilkins said.
“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.’”