Kansas University basketball coach Bill Self spoke on Friday about the death of former UCLA coaching legend John Wooden.

“It’s a sad day. From a selfish standpoint we have lost not only one of the greatest coaches of all-time, but one of the greatest men,” Self said. “At his services it will be a ‘who’s who’ because he has touched so many lives, including mine.”

Self and his wife, Cindy, spent a weekend with Wooden when Self was presented the Wooden Coach of the Year award in the spring of 2000 in Salt Lake City.

“He is so at peace with who he is that I think his life should be considered an unbelievable celebration,” Self said. “It’s not so much what he told me as how he lives his life. His ‘Pyramid of Success’ is something everybody could look at and say, ‘I’d like to live my life that way.’ How much respect he had for discipline and family and people far exceeded (what he did on the court). He used basketball as a tool to basically create character and build lives through it. He won big … obviously bigger than anybody has ever won. But through basketball he mentored and molded lives and used basketball as an avenue to do that.”