At halftime of a basketball game in Las Vegas last Tuesday, a woman tapped her card at a snack-shop reader to pay for Steve Kerr's M&Ms, nachos, and beer, a head coach she evidently believed would wander up to the concourse midgame in search of a snack and a light buzz. (It was preseason, after all). She told him, with his spiky silver hair and square jaw and bright blue eyes, that she was grateful for his contributions to society and for his activism. She snapped a picture, and walked away.
He did not have the heart nor the time to tell her that she had just paid $46 in concession snacks for an entirely different man named Steve.
"I didn't say anything," Steve Gillis recalled Monday, still baffled. "I was so dumbfounded. And she wanted to get the picture, and she wanted to get away. I didn't correct her. I did not. I'm sorry! I did not!"
Really, though, Gillis - an English teacher at Bishop Gorman High in Las Vegas - has been dealing with such circumstances for the better part of his life. He took his 9- and 10-year-old boys to the Warriors-Lakers game and days later, his likeness went so viral that friends in Denmark, England and Brazil were texting him X links of his face. Kerr even appeared to turn and glance in confusion at Gillis in a viral video, sitting a few rows behind Golden State's bench at T-Mobile Arena.
The reason is simple: Gillis bears a remarkable resemblance to Kerr. He can never escape it. His students come up to him in the halls. People walk up at the airports, and ask him for pictures. This has haunted Gillis for three decades, since Kerr rose to NBA prominence as a guard with the Chicago Bulls in the mid-1990s.
Well, not haunted. He's glad for it, this luck of remarkably similar genetic draw. Or, at least - glad for his doppelganger's public image.
"Of all the people I could be associated with, like, this is a stroke of good luck," Gillis said. "Because he seems like an upstanding guy. Seems like an absolute class act."
By some cosmic miracle, too, his name just also so happens to be Steve. And Gillis, too, is even a coach himself, the co-founder of Las Vegas club-volleyball organization Summerlin Volleyball Academy. Gillis has been the Whitworth University women's volleyball head coach, an assistant coach at Washington and an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic men's volleyball team in 1998.
Longtime friend Tom Hoff, a former Olympian who played under Gillis in 1998, swears there's no strange play at hand here. Sure, the resemblance is "crazy," as Hoff put it. But Gillis, Hoff swears, has no larger ulterior motive.
"I know the guy extremely well," Hoff said. "He doesn't vie for this. He doesn't try to play into it."
Gillis swears, too, he has not used his facial similarity for a leg up. Or any favors. They just result, sometimes, in a free $46 in snacks. And Gillis sat right behind Golden State's bench in Vegas, Hoff said, with the intention to listen and learn from Kerr, a coach he long has admired.
"Maybe this is the question you're getting at - did I go to the game with the intention of trying to garner something?" Gillis said. "Absolutely not. I'm a massive fan, and have been, for the Warriors."
Gillis, in fact, has no public social-media presence, and only found out about his sudden virality - which has exploded before, in 2024 - because Hoff texted him Saturday. Gillis, largely, describes it as embarrassing. Those around him find it more fun. Hoff, a longtime Bulls fan, balked the first time Gillis walked into a men's Olympic team gym in 1998.
"I go, ‘Who the hell are you? What the?'" Hoff recalled, believing Kerr himself had strolled in.
Gillis didn't believe the resemblance, back then. One night on the road, Hoff and the men's Olympic team dragged Gillis out to a bar in Grand Rapids, Mich. The entire population - staff, customers, you name it - were stunned at the presence of not-so-Steve-Kerr, Hoff said with a chuckle.
Some even began to buy them shots.
"It's a baffling thing," Hoff said.
Gillis sees it now, because it has followed him everywhere. There could be worse things, he believes.
"It's serendipitous," Gillis said.
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There’s more to San Francisco with the Chronicle. Subscribe today for just 25¢.This article originally published at Steve Kerr's Vegas doppelganger got mistaken for Warriors coach - and got free beer.