‘It’s all I want to do’: Dakota State coach Gary Garner leans on basketball during cancer fight – Argus Leader
When Gary Garner received the news that the off-and-on pain he had been experiencing for some time in his abdomen was caused by a tumor on his pancreas, he understood the diagnosis to mean only one thing.
“When my doctor said, ‘This is not good,’ I took it as an indication that I had better get my financial situation in order,” said the 76-year-old Garner, now in his 11th year as the head men’s basketball coach at Dakota State University in Madison.
Being diagnosed with a cancer that has one of the worst survival rates can do that to a person. Though not overly familiar with the disease at that time, Garner knew enough. He figured he had a 2 or 3 percent chance to survive.
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That was March 23, 2017. Intense chemotherapy treatments began that summer in Sioux Falls, followed by surgery to remove the tumor in Omaha in late fall.
November is when college basketball gets into full swing. At DSU, Garner is trying to get his team – which has no seniors on its roster – back on track and in contention for a NorthStar Athletic Association championship after finishing just 9-22 a season ago.
November is also Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, the time of year when advocacy groups across the globe unite by speaking out about the disease, raising funds for early diagnosis research and raising awareness in their local communities.
To see Garner today – he says he weighs 20 pounds more than he ever has – trying to get the most out of his young basketball team, one can only marvel at the odds he has had to overcome.
Facing the challenge
According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 56,770 Americans in 2019 will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the U.S., and more than 45,750 will die from the disease.
It’s the third-leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States and one of the few cancers for which survival has not improved substantially for more than 40 years.
Other than the on-again, off-again abdominal pain that alerted his doctor, Garner did not show any of the symptoms usually associated with pancreatic cancer. Those symptoms include pain (usually abdominal or back pain), weight loss, jaundice (yellowing of the skin and eyes), loss of appetite, nausea, changes in stool, and diabetes.
During his surgery in 2017, doctors removed the entire pancreas and one-third of his stomach, along with his spleen. Garner was fortunate in that surgical removal of the tumor is possible in less than 20 percent of patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In most patients, detection doesn’t occur until the cancer is in late stages and has spread beyond the pancreas.
Thankfully, no cancer was found in the surrounding lymph nodes. He was hospitalized nearly two weeks and back on the basketball court two months later, exerting as much energy as he could muster in doing the only thing he truly knows how to do.
“I don’t play golf or hunt or fish, or any of those things,” said Garner, who along with his wife, Barb, has two sons and two grandsons. “Family comes first, of course, then it’s basketball. Coaching, it’s all I want to do.”
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His love for the game started at an early age. Garner grew up in West Plains, Mo., just north of the Arkansas border, then played basketball at the University of Missouri. Hall of Fame coach Norm Stewart, then an assistant then at Missouri, helped recruit him.
Garner started his coaching career at Kemper Military School and College in Booneville, Mo., when the Vietnam War was in full swing.
He left Kemper Military for Trenton (Mo.) Junior College, now North Central Missouri College. A 95-47 mark there got him an offer to become the head coach at Missouri Southern State College in Joplin. About the same time as the ink was drying on his Missouri Southern contract, Garner got a call from Stewart, now the head coach at Missouri, offering his one-time recruit a spot on his Tigers’ staff.
“I told Norm I had just signed to coach at Missouri Southern and he said for me to stay and that he would keep the position open for a year,” Garner said. “So, I had to tell the Missouri Southern president what I was doing. He wasn’t too happy with me.”
Opportunity knocks
Garner parlayed his experience working under Stewart to get hired as head coach at Drake University in Des Moines. Garner was the top assistant under Stewart, recruiting top players such as Steve Stipanovich, Jon Sundvold, and Curtis Berry. His last two years with the Tigers, they qualified for the NCAA tournament with 25-6 and 22-10 records.
Garner was just 37 when he signed a three-year contract to replace Bob Ortegel at Drake. His record was 95-104 over seven seasons, which included a trip to the NIT in 1986 where the Bulldogs’ season ended with a loss to Marquette, coached by Rick Majerus.
Drake and Garner parted ways following the 1987-88 season. His next stop was his most successful.
Garner was introduced as the head basketball coach at NCAA Division II Fort Hays (Kan.) State before the start of the 1991-92 season. A member of the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference, Garner led the Tigers to a 34-0 mark and the school’s first national championship in 1996.
Along the way and playing on its home floor, Fort Hays State defeated Scott Nagy-coached South Dakota State 99-90 in the finals of the North Central Regional to reach the Elite Eight in Louisville, Ky. The Tigers captured the title with a 70-63 win over Northern Kentucky.
Garner, who was inducted into the RMAC Hall of Fame in 2011, compiled a 138-44 mark in six years at Fort Hays State, including a 49-game winning streak spread across two seasons that, at the time, was the second-longest in Division II history.
Garner returned to the Division I coaching ranks in 1997, hired by Southeast Missouri State of the Ohio Valley Conference. His best season came in 1999-2000 when the Redhawks went 24-7 and won the regular-season and conference tournament titles to gain a 13-seed in the NCAA tournament. Their season ended with a first round 64-61 loss to LSU . Garner coached nine seasons at Southeast Missouri, finishing with an overall mark of 126-132.
Garner was 62 when he left, and for the first time, he was faced with the prospect of being done with the only sport he truly loved. He went without coaching for a year.
“Boy, talk about missing it,” he said.
Coming to South Dakota
Coaches in any sport develop a long list of contacts and, Garner is no different. He still had good friends from his days of living in Des Moines when he coached at Drake. One of those friends told him about an expansion team getting ready to start in the NBA Developmental League.
For two years he served as an assistant with the Iowa Energy, now known as the Wolves of the NBA’s G-League. The head coach was current Toronto Raptors coach Nick Nurse, who once was an assistant at the University of South Dakota.
Working with professional players rather than college kids was far different, and far less rewarding, for Garner.
“In that league, players are getting called up or sent down for 10-day assignments, so it’s not like working with your own team and your own roster,” he said.
After two years working the professional ranks, Garner found himself at a crossroads. Does he take an offer to join the Chicago Bulls as an assistant, or does he try to find another college position?
“I had a long talk with my wife,” he said. “I was 65 years old. I told her the next small-college job that came open that I was going to go for it. This is where I went.”
Former Dakota State athletic director Gene Wockenfuss hired Garner in time for the 2009-10 season, replacing Wade Kooiman. In a span of five seasons, Garner guided the Trojans to the NAIA Division II national tournament four times, including 2012-13 when DSU reached the Elite Eight, en route to a 25-9 overall mark, the best of Garner’s tenure with the Trojans. The 25 wins is also the most in school history.
Dakota State had enjoyed seven consecutive winning seasons until Garner had to step aside for a time to deal with his cancer during the 2017-18 season. The Trojans finished 14-17 that year before slumping to the 9-22 mark last season.
“Cancer probably set the program back a couple years,” Garner said. “I didn’t have the energy I needed, plus I think we lost some players who we were recruiting but went elsewhere because they didn’t know what my situation might be.
“My former assistant (Mike Larsen), who is now coaching an NAIA team in Montana (Montana Western), asked me when I came back if cancer made me still want to coach. I told him it made me want to coach more. Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have coached that season. I’m not sure it was fair to our players.”
Garner entered this season with a 159-153 record at DSU, the second most wins in school history, behind only the late Ed Harter.
In addition to the few extra pounds he has put on – he lost nearly 40 while undergoing chemotherapy followed by the surgery – Garner’s white hair, which he lost to the treatments, is thicker than before. The surgery altered his lifestyle, forcing him to deal with diabetes as one of the results of losing his pancreas.
Another constant is neuropathy in his feet. Neuropathy is a nerve problem that causes pain, numbness, tingling, swelling, or muscle weakness in different parts of the body and usually gets worse over time. It’s a side effect of the chemotherapy and most likely will never go away.
The neuropathy caused a fall while going through chemotherapy treatments, the result being a couple of broken ribs when Garner hit the side of his bed on the way down.
But Garner keeps going, with basketball as his guide. He knows he is lucky to be alive, not to mention being able to still coach the game he loves.
“As long as I have my health, I am going to keep coaching,” he said. “The good Lord has been so good to me. I just feel so fortunate.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wade Merry is a former sportswriter and sports editor for Argus Leader Media and is currently a Development Officer at Dakota State University in Madison, S.D. His wife, Valerie, died of pancreatic cancer in July of 2015. Merry and his children founded the Valerie Raye Merry Endowment for Precision Oncology at the Avera Cancer Institute. He also serves on the board of directors of the Nikki Mitchell Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Nashville, Tenn., which provides comfort and relief for those affected by pancreatic cancer, while raising awareness and searching for the cure.
Published 5:30 PM EST Nov 12, 2019
