Punching The Right Buttons Keady Doesn’T Have ‘Do, But He’S A Cut Above

The face. The hair. The bench demeanor of a dyspeptic bear.

Gene Keady, says one of his old coaching friends, has a great ability to laugh at himself, and that’s probably a very good thing - because no matter how serious-minded his approach to the game of basketball is as coach of the Purdue Boilermakers, his sideline manner is right out of a cartoon.

“I was the original guy who said it and I get no credit for it,” claimed Jud Heathcote, “but the only reason he got the Purdue job was that down in the fine print, it said the head coach had to look like the team mascot.

“He got the job over a lot better coaches, but he was the only guy who fit that clause in the contract.”

Oh, it’s a tough week for the backseat drivers’ club in Spokane.

It’s Gonzaga vs. Purdue on Thursday in the NCAA West Regional semifinals at The Pit, and the ties that bind the coaching fraternity couldn’t be more tangled. Back home, there are three former Division I coaches - Heathcote, Don Monson and Dan Fitzgerald - with 887 college victories among them and an emotional stake in the Bulldogs that runs deeper than their well of stories. They are, in various ways, the godfathers of Gonzaga basketball - either through a sweat-and-blood investment in the program or their obvious and telling influence on the current coaching staff, or both.

And yet all three happen to be close friends with Gene Keady, who in turn happens to be an unabashed admirer of Gonzaga basketball.

So much so that it took not much arm-twisting at all to get him to headline a coaching clinic in Spokane a couple of years ago as a benefit to the Bulldogs program.

Didn’t take much to get him out on the golf course, either, in a foursome at Manito Country Club with Heathcote, Monson and Fitzgerald.

“Somebody,” Fitzgerald recalled, “hollered over at us, `That group doesn’t need a caddy, it needs an official.”’

Someone to yell at, in other words. This is one more thing Keady has in common with his three friends in Spokane.

“I know he looks like a bear coming out of a cave on the sidelines,” Monson said. “But people said the same thing about me, and you know how nice a guy I am.”

Playing your friends is maybe the toughest duty in college sports, and in that regard it tempers things somewhat that Gonzaga coach Mark Few and his aides aren’t Keady’s contemporaries. Respectful of his reputation and achievements, yes, but not direct disciples or golf-course heckling partners.

Same goes for Few’s predecessor and Monson’s son, Dan, who is now trying to resurrect the program at Minnesota and, as such, is officially “a Big Ten guy now.

“But blood is thicker than water,” he insisted. “Those are my guys. There’s no way I’ll be rooting for anybody but Gonzaga.”

And, frankly, the same is true for Heathcote, Monson and Fitzgerald, all of whom would love to see Keady achieve a lifelong dream of reaching the Final Four - but not at Gonzaga’s expense.

For Heathcote, the relation- ship goes back to long before he was at Michigan State playing Keady’s Purdue teams, to the mid-1970s. Keady was still Eddie Sutton’s assistant at Arkansas and Heathcote was the head man at Montana.

“That’s when Gene was offered the Idaho State job, and he turned it down because they wouldn’t move him,” Heathcote said. “He thought if they were that cheap, it couldn’t be that good of a job. So, of course, I got on him that he was too good for the Big Sky. I’d say, `Hey, Gene, I guess since Kentucky and UCLA didn’t open this year, you won’t be getting a head coaching job.”’

Monson served as Keady’s assistant on the United States team in the 1991 Pan American Games in Cuba, becoming closer than might normally be the case by sharing space in one of the huts the Cubans built as an “Olympic village.”

“We look in the shower and there’s this wire running along the wall and right into the head of the shower,” Monson recalled. “I looked at Gene and he looked at me and he said, `There’s no way I’m getting under that.’ A little later that day, I turned on the faucet and come to find out that’s how they heated the water. But we were both sure we’d be electrocuted. We were wondering how many days we could go without a shower.”

Fitzgerald began bumping into Keady at the first of the “meat market” summer camps, Superstars in San Diego. Like Fitzgerald, Keady was a protege of Bud Presley - long ago a Gonzaga assistant and something of a guru to that generation of coaches.

“He’s the last of the old-school guys,” Fitzgerald said of Keady, “though I think he could do a better job with that damned haircut.”

Well, yes, the hair. What Heathcote for years tried to cover up vertically, Keady has doggedly attempted to remedy horizontally.

“The two worst haircuts in Big Ten history,” joked Fitzgerald.

But no matter his tonsorial shortcomings, Keady’s old-school ways are what his brethren admire.

“He’s been maligned somewhat by people say he can coach during the season, but that he can’t coach during the tournament,” Heathcote said. “Well, that’s just wrong. He gets his players to work so hard and play so hard that they overachieve - and then they get to the point where overachievement isn’t going to win games. That’s the NCAA Tournament. And I think the fact that he’s in the Sweet 16 for the third straight year is evidence enough he can coach in the postseason.”

Even more remarkable may be the fact that Keady has taken the Boilers to six Big Ten titles and five Sweet 16s with only one player who ever went on to significant NBA success - Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson.

“The final barometer is how hard your kids play over a long period of time,” Fitzgerald said. “His teams reflect his personality. Gene isn’t a chardonnay guy.”

Noted Dan Monson, “They’re Gonzaga, in a different way.”

Little Monse’s scouting report is simple: The Boilermakers won’t beat themselves. That is, the Bulldogs probably won’t get even a skosh of help the way they did when Louisville and St. John’s committed some injudicious fouls and jacked up some ill-advised shots in the first two rounds. He figures the Zags, having had great success so far with a zone, will try it again - “though I tried it and was down 31 at halftime.

“I came out after halftime and told him, `If this was a camp game, we’d have running time - no clock stoppages. How about that?’ He looked at me and said, `I knew you were going to say something smart-ass.”’

Hey, at least it wasn’t about his hair or his bench behavior.

“You know, he has a very even disposition,” said Heathcote, delivering one more dagger. “He’s mad all the time.”