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The late Harvey Pate deserves to be remembered
Published: 10/4/2010 7:35 PM
Last Modified: 10/5/2010 11:01 AM

The college basketball world lost Harvey Pate.

Who was Harvey Pate? If his name doesn’t ring a bell, it should. He’s a former Oklahoma State basketball player (and former Cameron head coach) who helped put Houston on the hoops map.

Pate spent nearly a quarter century as an assistant coach to Guy Lewis at Houston. In 1964, when the color barrier was overdue to fall, Pate drove Lewis to Baton Rouge so the head coach could sign Don Chaney. And, according to a 1993 Los Angeles Times story, Pate continued driving to Rayville, La., where he signed a player named (maybe you’ve heard of him) Elvin Hayes.

Quick history lesson: Hayes was the star of the “Game of the Century” on Jan. 20, 1968. Outdueling Lew Alcindor, Hayes collected 39 points and 15 rebounds as Houston snapped UCLA’s 47-game winning streak in front of more than 52,000 fans at the Astrodome. It was the first nationally televised regular season college basketball game broadcast in prime time and Hayes capitalized on the big performance to become the Sporting News’ player of the year that season. In 1996, Hayes got a bigger honor. He was judged to be one of the top 50 players in NBA history.

Once described by Sports Illustrated as a surrogate father to Hayes, Pate, 91, died Saturday. Graveside services were 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Seneca (Mo.) Cemetary.

According to an obituary published in the Joplin Globe, Pate was born in Byars, Okla., and played only one year of basketball at Capitol Hill High School in Oklahoma City. He moved on to Oklahoma A&M, where he was tagged with the nickname “Hoss” while playing for Henry Iba from 1938-41.

A 2009 interview with the Seneca Post-Dispatch produced this anecdote: Pate got a job hauling trash while at OSU and got his clothes so dirty that he mailed them home for his mother to wash. When he ran out of clean clothes, he quit his job. The story said Iba gave Pate a new job of helping the athletic department find good athletes to recruit.

Pate found his calling. He became head basketball coach at Cameron, compiling a 165-56 record from 1947-56. Then he migrated to Houston and helped Lewis lure a pantheon of great players to campus.

Pate told the Seneca newspaper that he could relate to players like Hayes because they came from the same kind of background. He also told the newspaper that he didn’t bother telling Hayes that the team practiced in a high school gym because the Cougars didn’t have a facility of their own.

After 24 years in Houston, Pate retired to Seneca, hometown of his wife, the former Laura Brady. They married in 1943. She apparently bought his recruiting pitch, too.



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Tulsa World sports writer Jimmie Tramel is a former class president at Locust Grove High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Northeastern State University with a journalism degree and, while attending college, was sports editor of the Pryor Daily Times. He joined the Tulsa World on Oct. 17, 1989, the same day an earthquake struck the World Series. He is the OSU basketball beat writer and a columnist and feature writer during football season. In 2007, he wrote a book about Oklahoma State football with former Cowboy coach Pat Jones.

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