BATON ROUGE, La. — The hard exterior of the barrel-chested, red-blooded Cajun coach turned soft in a Los Angeles hospital room.
His wife laid on a gurney, medical staff hurriedly wheeling Kelly Orgeron to emergency surgery, the infection in her lower abdomen serious enough that it came with a warning. Kelly might not make it, a doctor told Ed Orgeron, pulling aside the brawny husband out of earshot, so he thought, from the sickly wife.
From her fast-moving gurney, her stomach churning with pain, Kelly heard the doctor’s troubling words, and she responded with a gesture meant for her soulmate, flinging into the air an index finger and shaking it like a first-grade teacher does at a mischievous student.