Gregg Doyel

This story is about Gene Keady's combover.

Hey, why dance around it? It may be a terrible idea for a column, but it was a terrible idea for a hairdo. You think you know how terrible his combover was? You don't know the half of it. By the time you're finished with this story, you'll know just how much it cost the legendary Purdue basketball coach to maintain the combover until he got rid of it last year. You'll know the absurd lengths he went to keep it.

And you'll know that the combover could have killed him.

And know this. When he returned my phone message, these were the first words out of Keady's mouth:

"I don't mind you writing about my hair."

How good a sport is Gene Keady? He knew I wanted to talk about his hair. He knew that was the story, but only if he agreed to talk. No phone call, no story.

Keady called me right away.

So those were the first words out of his mouth. These were the next few:

"It was ugly," he says. "Everyone was always asking, 'What is it? Why are you doing it?' I did it because I was on TV. I did it because I was going bald. I thought I looked gorgeous with the combover. Of course, it was very ugly."

Well, it was worse than that. It was obvious. It was embarrassing. It was dyed black and wrapped around his head like a turban.

It wasn't even real.

"I had extensions," Keady tells me, at which point I put the phone down and started throwing up. OK, not really. But still. Extensions?

"Well sure," he says. "Men were just starting to get extensions, so why not?"

I've never known a man who had hair extensions.

"Now you do," Keady says.

Keady knew his hair needed work – what, you think a man can just roll out of bed and look like that? – so he brought in his personal hairdresser twice a week during the season to tidy it up. She came with extensions. She came with hair dye. She came with cream.

She left each time with $300.

You read that right. Gene Keady paid $600 a week to have his hair look like that.

Everything changed in 2011 when Keady, who has worked with Steve Lavin at St. John's since 2010, went to Silverleaf Tavern in New York City and was approached by a male fan. They talked, and kept talking, and talked so long that the fan's dinner companion came over to fetch him.

Kathleen Petrie didn't know who Gene Keady was, but she liked him. And he liked her. Keady's friend, St. John's associate athletics director Mark Fratto, could see it in the way Keady wouldn't even make eye contact with Kathleen. So Fratto gave her the coach's number, urged her to call, and she did a few days later.

They married in June.

It's Kathleen who hated the hair enough to get rid of it.

"But not at first," Keady says. "She let it go almost a year. I think the final straw was the time I brought her to Lafayette, and it happened to be the day my barber came by. When that was finished, she said, 'Let's go.' She sat me down, pulled out the electric razor, and zzzzzzt."

Combover. Gone.

That was January 2013. Later that year Keady and former Indiana coach Bob Knight spoke before a crowd of 800 at the annual Indiana Society of Chicago Foundation's dinner. When it was Knight's turn at the podium, he asked, "Would Mrs. Keady stand up?"

Kathleen stood. And then Knight said:

"Mrs. Keady, I want to thank you for making your husband get rid of that hideous combover."

Well, it was love. Before they were married, Gene Keady took Kathleen to a Nike camp in Hawaii. Every time someone asked for their wedding date, Kathleen had to say she didn't know, her minister was out of town a lot. Finally one of the Nike officials said, "You're getting married tomorrow."

"And so we did!" Kathleen screams at me over the phone, laughing at the impetuousness of it all. "Gene wore a Nike shirt, Nike shorts, Nike sneakers. I wore white pajama bottoms and a shirt I got at the gift shop. And flip-flops."

Adds Gene Keady: "Tubby Smith gave the bride away. The best man was Bruce Weber. He was the flower girl, too."

A few months earlier, Kathleen Keady had sat down her husband and sheared off his combover. Guess what she found underneath?

"Squamous cell carcinoma," Kathleen says, naming the fairly common (700,000 new cases in the United States annually), occasionally fatal (almost 9,000 deaths) form of skin cancer. "It's possible he wouldn't be here today if he'd kept that hair."

No kidding, I started to tell Kathleen Keady, who interrupts--

"Plus it was ugly," she says.

Aww, is Gene sitting there listening? He can hear you!

"I don't care," she says. "Coach thought it was pretty dapper. I think it was horrible. I mean, it was really weird looking."

OK, I tell Kathleen. Got it.

"I mean, it was scary," she says. "And he's already so stern looking. But with that hairdo, it was like Halloween or something, and …"

Follow Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar