They called him Coach. Sometimes they lengthened it to Coach Wooden. But that's all they called him.
Whether they were callow 18-year-old freshmen or world-famous former UCLA Bruins answering to Kareem, Gail or Bill, as in Walton, they never once referred to him as John, Woodsy or even the Wizard of Westwood.
Just Coach.
Only Coach.
"There was just this aura about him," said Covenant College coach Kyle Taylor, who was a UCLA walk-on in 2001, 26 years after John Wooden retired on the eve of winning his 10th NCAA basketball championship in 12 years.
"He was so sharp," Taylor recalled. "I was sitting in his living room three or four years ago -- he was 95 or 96 years old -- and he still recognized me from being on the team one year. I was just a recruited walk-on bum, but he still remembered me."
We're all remembering this weekend, remembering the greatest coach who ever lived. And just maybe one of the best people.
Name another person on the planet who could have owned basketball for more than a decade, winning seven straight NCAA titles and 88 straight games in that span and reaching 11 Final Fours in 12 seasons, yet never made more than $35,000 a year?
His first four years at UCLA, he worked at a dairy every morning from 6 until noon "because I needed the money."
He was living in the same two-bedroom house in Encino, Calif., when he died that he'd lived in 40 years earlier. According to Taylor, the last car Wooden drove was the same one he'd had for at least 20 years -- "a beat-up, two-door tan hatchback. He wasn't about fancy cars or big houses. He was about relationships."
Mostly, he was about one relationship, his beloved Nell. They were high school sweethearts back home in Martinsville, Ind., despite his high school coach's rule against dating.
Then again, this was John Wooden, future star guard of the Purdue Boilermakers and the only person ever inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach.
Or maybe the coach could see this was something special, a match literally made in heaven. For after Nell died in 1985, Wooden wrote her a love letter on the 21st day of every month thereafter, leaving it on her pillow.
When he died on Friday night at the age of 99, new St. John's coach Steve Lavin -- who was Taylor's coach at UCLA -- said: "Ninety-nine years of goodness, and now he's back with Nell."
He was good but he was also tough. With the Bruins trailing Long Beach State by 11 points in the 1971 Western Regional, Wooden called time out, then sceamed at his players, "You're nothing but a bunch of All-American woman chasers and hopheads!"
Naturally, the Bruins rallied to top the 49ers on their way to their fifth straight NCAA title.
Then there was the time Walton decided to test Wooden's no-facial-hair rule at the start of practice before the 1972-73 season. Reporting for the team photo with a beard and shaggy hair, Walton was told, "Bill, I appreciate (your opinion). And we'll miss you."
Walton grabbed a razor as quickly as he usually grabbed a rebound.
Such discipline once led the incomparable L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray to write: "John Wooden's so square he's divisible by four."
Or as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- who was Lew Alcindor during his UCLA days -- observed, "He was more like a parent than a coach."
This was not to say Wooden had no flaws. The dirty little secret of all those championships was shadowy booster Sam Gilbert, who reportedly took care of every player's need that Wooden might have denied. There is little evidence that Gilbert lured players to Westwood, but also little doubt that he made their time there more comfortable.
Yet whatever happened behind the scenes, Wooden was without peer on the sideline, winning big, small, fast and not so fast.
And Taylor will tell you that 26 years after his retirement, the Wizard could still motivate while barely saying a word.
"Coach Wooden would come by practice sometimes," Taylor said. "Coach Lavin would always ask him to address the team and sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn't. But the level of play always picked up dramatically when he was in the building. Drills were a little crisper. Guys were diving on the floor a lot more."
The last time Taylor saw Wooden, he was deeply struck by the contents of his home: stacks upon stacks of books, photos of Nell and his teams, lots of pictures of Mother Teresa and Abraham Lincoln.
"By far his two favorite (famous) people," Taylor said. "Integrity was so important to him."
Taylor said he doesn't try to copy everything in Wooden's playbook. The coach's famous Pyramid for Success doesn't hang in his office. He doesn't have a haircut rule. He doesn't roll up his game program or shout a quaint, "Goodness gracious sakes alive" in the general direction of the officials.
"But I do try to run a program that focuses as much on character development as winning basketball games," he said.
As anyone attempting to emulate 99 years of goodness would.