The Blood and Guts by Tyler Dunne

Author:Tyler Dunne [DUNNE, TYLER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Finding Gates

Basketball film was all NFL teams had to study. The agent for Antonio Gates sent the footage out to teams and one scouting assistant for the San Diego Chargers thought his higher-ups should take a look.

Truthfully, Jimmy Raye III wasn’t sold. The team’s college scouting director had seen this song and dance a million times. “Maybe,” the son of Tony Gonzalez’s favorite coach thought. That “maybe” was enough for Raye to pass the tape along to the team’s tight ends coach, Tim Brewster, and Brewster? He saw Charles Barkley in pads. He strummed up a relationship with Gates right away.

“And I’ll never forget him saying, ‘Jimmy, this guy thinks he can be great,’” Raye says. “So I’m like, ‘OK, that’s saying something. That’s a start.’”

Gates held a predraft workout inside the Kent State Field House where the five teams in attendance had no reason to think he’d ever amount to anything. His body was fleshy, not muscular. He looked like a basketball player and ran a pedestrian 4.8 in the 40. A total nonstarter. Scouts from the Indianapolis Colts, Pittsburgh Steelers, and San Francisco 49ers were in attendance, as well as tight ends coaches from the Cleveland Browns and San Diego. And Brewster knew something the others did not: Gates had sprained his ankle a week earlier in a basketball showcase.

The two had been talking for two months and grabbed dinner the night before.

When Brewster reported back to the Chargers, he told them they needed to sign Gates as an undrafted free agent and informed Raye that Gates ran a 4.62. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Raye thought. “We might’ve really just stumbled across something.” Raye ran it up the food chain and everyone agreed to sign Gates after the seven rounds passed. All the rookie wanted was a bump from $5,000 to $7,500 for his signing bonus. Afterward, Brewster visited Raye’s office and came clean. Gates actually hadn’t run a 4.62. He pulled a 4.83.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God. What have we done?’” Raye said. “He loved the kid so much. I’ll say this with all certainty. If it wasn’t for the relationship Tim Brewster established with the kid and the fact that he was on board with working with Antonio and the belief he had in him—and the belief the kid had in himself—he probably wouldn’t have ended up being a San Diego Charger. It was a match made in heaven.”

Gates hadn’t played football since high school but, at Kent State, the six-foot-four forward averaged 20.6 points and 7.7 rebounds per game as a senior. The year before, he led the tenth-seeded Golden Flashes to the Elite Eight. His timing was perfect. He was offering his athleticism to the NFL right when Gonzalez’s trapeze acts were proving to be unguardable in the early 2000s. Raye confirms that Gonzalez’s ascent absolutely opened the eyes of the entire scouting community.

In training camp, Gates played with a fluidness that so many other draftable tight ends Raye had studied over the years lacked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.