What was playing for Gene Keady like? ‘Rip you and tell you you are OK in same sentence.’

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Todd Foster knew the moment Gene Keady’s eyes started scanning the room he was in trouble. Not necessarily because Foster in particular had done anything wrong. But when Keady sensed Purdue basketball had slipped somewhere below the standard, well, you might want to avert your gaze.

“When he was mad,” Foster said, “he’d pick on everybody. If somebody is not playing hard, he’d go around the room and if you made eye contact all of a sudden it was ‘You gotta cut your damn hair, too, Foster.’ Then he’d keep going around the room to someone else.”

Foster’s relationship with the 87-year-old Keady, who will be inducted Saturday into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, is perhaps closer to his former coach than many former Boilermakers. Foster not only played four years for Keady in the 1990s, but was an assistant on his staff and is currently the sports academic advisor at Purdue. Keady visits Foster every time he’s in West Lafayette, stopping by the “mini-Mackey Arena” Foster built with wife Jessica that also serves as an Airbnb.

But Foster’s close bond with Keady is emblematic of how a large percentage of Boilermakers feel about their former coach. For 25 years, Keady came to define Purdue basketball, building a program that was defined by toughness and grounded in a sense of knowing who it was and what it wanted to be.

Purdue head coach Gene Keady (left) and associate head coach Matt Painter (right) watch a game at the Nike All-American Camp earlier this month in Indianapolis. Camps have become one of the most important aspects of high school basketball players, coaches and scouts. AP Photo.

Nobody looked tougher on the sideline than Keady, whose scowl could be more piercing than the sound of a referee’s whistle. There were times when Matt Painter, an Indiana fan until Keady recruited him out of Delta High School in 1989, felt that wrath as a player at times. “Brutally honest,” Painter said with a laugh. That honesty served him well,…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/playing-gene-keady-rip-tell-084504119.html?src=rss

Author : IndyStar | The Indianapolis Star

Publish date : 2023-08-11 08:45:04

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