'Bout damn time

 Word came down yesterday about the 2023 Basketball Hall of Fame class, and look who's in it: Old Bad Breakfast Guy himself.

That would be Gene Keady, of course, and as with a lot of things involving Keady there's a story about Bad Breakfast Guy. One afternoon he took his Purdue Boilermakers up to Michigan State and they had an almighty tussle with Tom Izzo's Spartans, but in the end the Spartans prevailed. And here came Keady, not exactly growling about the refs but talking about one particular call by one particular ref.

The ref, Keady told us, said he was sorry about missing the call. But he'd had a bad breakfast and he wasn't feeling well.

"A bad breakfast?" Keady barked. "We're tryin' to win a game here, and he's talking about a bad breakfast?"

There are a million Gene moments like that, and anyone who covered his Boilers incorporated them into the Gene Keady impressions they all had down pat. "What the hell's goin' on?" was a standard Keady observation on the state of basketball/the world. "Typical media s***" was another.

And then, of course, as night follows day, there was "Why wouldn't you want to play hard?" -- "playing hard" being one of Keady's bedrock mantras.

The Purdues always played hard, when Keady rode their bench. They might not always beat you, but you knew you'd been in a basketball game when you played them.

It's why the man took Purdue to 17 NCAA tournaments and won 493 games and was the Big Ten Coach of the Year a record seven times. And it's also why it's about damn time he's going to Springfield, the Hall of Fame being somewhere he's belonged long before now.

Keady would never say that himself, of course, because he was never one to waste time with self-absorption. Behind those scowls and that bulldog jaw jutting out a mile was a far more gracious man than his public persona suggested. If he got mad at you for something, he never stayed mad. Unlike his great rival down in Bloomington, he didn't nurse grudges like they were family heirlooms.

Quick story: Back in the day the newspaper for which I worked got an anonymous letter accusing Keady of all sorts of shenanigans. Although as far as I know no one questioned the provenance of the letter, we took it and ran with it, running story after story for months that mostly amounted to not much.

In the midst of all this, Keady showed up in town to watch some potential future Boilers play. I approached him -- warily -- for a quote or two. When I told him who I was and what paper I was with, he kind of reared back and looked at me.

"You guys haven't been treatin' me very nice," he said.

And then gave me the quote or two I was looking for.

That was Gene Keady.