NEWLY smitten with the surf, and anxious to practise his board-paddling skills, the teenaged Tim Gates threw his board in his parents’ backyard swimming pool, anchoring the leg rope to a fence.
So hard did he paddle, the legend goes, he pulled the fence down.
The story is apocryphal, quite possibly dreamt up in the recesses of his mind, and repeated ad nauseam to frighten nippers on the Fairhaven Beach.
But it’s also just as likely true, and anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
For that was the thing with the man remembered yesterday as “Gatesy”. The story was as important as the achievement itself, the road trip to the beach as much fun as the waves caught.
Yesterday, more than 2000 people filled Melbourne Grammar’s Memorial Hall to farewell the father of three, who died last Thursday.
The decorated surf lifesaving champion and long-time instructor was pulled from the surf at his beloved Fairhaven three days earlier, after he was knocked unconscious in the surf by his board.
He was 55.
A teacher at Melbourne Grammar since 1981, Tim Gates, with his wife, Jane, ran the school’s outdoor education camp at Woodend.
By principal Paul Sheahan’s reckoning, more than 8000 students benefited from the camp experience.
Mr Sheahan said that Gatesy was a legend of the beach and the bush, a man who spent a sizeable slice of his life in Blundstone boots or in Speedos.
But he was a man confident in any situation, and with any company.
“If ever there was a man who could live Kipling’s words: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings — nor lose the common touch’, it was he,” Mr Sheahan said.
The tributes to Tim Gates came from all quarters yesterday.
From university mates who remembered his inability to cook anything more complicated than porridge, and his love of a party.
And from surf lifesaving buddies who remembered the barrel-chested swimmer loudly proclaiming that he was “the champion of the club” before falling asleep on the couch. And snoring.
Or his fund-raising techniques on behalf of the Fairhaven Surf LifeSaving Club where he would reach into people’s wallets, past the $10 note they were going to offer the doorknockers, to grab the $20 behind it.
But the most moving memories came from his daughters.
Sarah, 16, told her Dad that she was proud of him.
“I will miss every day, for the rest of my life, your hugs and sloppy kisses.”
Youngest daughter Emma promised “to grow up to be just like you”.
Sammy, 18, choked back tears as she read a bittersweet poem.
“He kisses us, he hugs us,
It makes me feel so glad,
I really can’t imagine,
A life without my dad.”
It was hot, oppressively so, inside Melbourne Grammar’s hall yesterday.
Mourners fanned themselves, gazed outside and thought “on a day like today, Gatesy would be at the beach”.
But the heat was ignored. Friends, work colleagues, lifesaving comrades, and former students bowed their heads in prayer. They had lost much.
A tribute song was sung.
“The beach has lost a legend, we can believe the ocean took him.
“We’re missing Tim.”
Original Article:
Ben Doherty
