Sports Illustrated - The never-been-told story of Kelly Orgeron, the wife of LSU's

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Just a few months before his first full season as LSU head coach began, Ed Orgeron's wife, Kelly, nearly lost her life in a medical emergency. This is her story.

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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.

“As if to say,” Kelly recalls the intention of her finger wag, “‘Don’t listen to him. I’ll be back.’”

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The latest chapter of Kelly’s story was kept secret the last 13 months, hidden from the bright media spotlight that shines on this Southeastern Conference program, purposely buried deep in the Louisiana mud.

Last May, three months before the start of his first full season as LSU’s football coach, Ed Orgeron dealt with a family crisis, the matriarch of his five-person household clinging to life, the victim of a surgical mishap. Doctors punctured her colon, a hole that created a two-month ordeal so horrific, she says, that at one point Kelly wished she were dead.

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A mutual friend convinced Kelly to drive the hour from her home in tiny Lake City, Ark., to meet the boisterous coach, known by a peculiar nickname, Bébé, a French word meaning “baby” that he adopted while growing up in south Louisiana.

Naturally, the two divorcees first laid eyes on one another on a football field.

“I went to their bowl practice,” Kelly says. “He was walking off the field and I said, ‘You must be Bébé.’”

“Why, yes I am,” Ed answered.

Two months later, they eloped, a marriage at a courthouse in Ed’s home parish witnessed, Kelly says, by a random stranger walking the halls. Her turbulent life as a college football coach’s wife began. Ed missed the birth of his twin sons, Cody and Parker, and later, he missed a lot more. The family—including Tyler, Kelly’s son from a previous marriage—lived separately from one another for five years during Ed’s time on Lane Kiffin’s staff, first at Tennessee and then Southern Cal.

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her husband having frantically phoned the doctor. He arrived, checked her blood pressure and read it to Kelly aloud: 69 over 37. A normal person’s blood pressure is 120 over 80. “Oh boy, I’m in trouble,” she mumbled to herself and quietly looked to her husband’s white, blank face. “I didn’t want to scare Ed.”

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