NONE OF THEM wanted to say what was inside them after the fact. The bonds were too strong. The life experiences were too intertwined. There they were, roughly a month ago, former Penn coaches Bob Weinhauer and Jack McCloskey, onetime Penn assistant Bob Staak and former Temple coach Don Casey in Jupiter, Fla., visiting with Chuck Daly. They talked, they laughed, they reminisced.

"Chuck always knew where the best spots for dinner were," Casey recalled. "Even then, he had a little bistro picked out where we were all going to go. He was looking forward to it. And then the doctors told me he couldn't go, and he was sad. But he told us to go. He handed me three $100 bills to pay for it."

There were vignettes everywhere, some about the man, some about the coach.

"I remember 1964," Casey said. "I was coaching at Bishop Eustace [Prep, in Pennsauken, N.J.], and through some friends Duke sent me to Minneapolis to help Chuck, who was an assistant coach, to do some scouting. I had never been on a plane. But I went. I met Chuck, and he took me on a walk through all of downtown Minneapolis, in and out of every men's store. We walked so long, I got a blister on my foot. He never bought anything."

For Daly, the Hall of Fame coach who died of pancreatic cancer on Saturday, that was a different sort of scouting trip. Over time, he would be as known for his immaculate dressing as much as his strategies and his ability managing people. But these were the early days, times his friends and colleagues still treasure.

"When he came to coach Penn, he was the one responsible for dressing up the rest of us," Casey said. "Alligator shoes? I didn't know they made shoes from alligators. Chuck got to know a guy who had a men's store in Upper Darby. Pretty soon, we all had a deal there. But that's the way he was. I don't think anyone was ever jealous because he was a big-picture guy. He was different than a lot of us, because he had a grand plan. Some coaches see their careers sort of evolve. He saw beyond that."

Casey eventually became the Temple coach, and faced some lean seasons.

"Chuck did an interview with Frank Dolson of the Inquirer," Casey recalled. "He talked about how his Penn teams always handled Princeton, but had trouble with our zone. We were having eight-, nine-win seasons, believing we were going to get better, but that column, Chuck's words, helped me. I thanked him for that, and I never forgot."

Daly, in his own way, planned for his assignment coaching the Dream Team in 1992.

"He went with a Reebok group to Barcelona well before the Olympics, and insisted on seeing the hotel that would house the Dream Team," Casey said. "He was told it was still being built, that all there was for the moment was a foundation. He insisted on going anyway. He was trying to figure out where the restaurants in the area would be that the players might frequent. He was surveying. A lot of us back then reacted to situations; Chuck initiated."

Casey laughed and said, "Terry [Daly's widow] has a hard job with what to do with Chuck's wardrobe."

"When we were there, she showed us his brown closet, his blue closet, everything that went with brown shoes, with black shoes," he said. "There must have been 50 to 100 suits. When I coached the [Los Angeles] Clippers and he was in town, he'd take me to Rodeo Drive. There were men's shops where you'd need an appointment to get in, but he'd knock on the door, someone would answer and say, 'Hi Chuck.' "

He was a man to be appreciated for his unique attributes.

"When you think of Philly in the winter, you think about snow, slush, messy streets, puddles," Weinhauer said. "I remember at Penn we'd go to lunch, me, Ray Carazo and Chuck. I'd come back, my shoes would be soaked, my slacks stained. I'd look at Chuck, and it was like he had just stepped out of GQ magazine. I never figured out how he did that."

Daly had great success coaching Penn but had his eyes on the NBA, even if that meant coming in as an assistant. And that was what he did. When Billy Cunningham succeeded Gene Shue with the 76ers, Cunningham had never coached a day in his life. He positioned Daly on one side of him, to learn technique, how to implement the X's-and-O's that had been second nature to him as a player, and placed Jack McMahon on the other side, to serve as the intermediary with the players. And neither Daly nor McMahon had the slightest problem teaching Cunningham all that they knew.

Later, Daly would win two championships with the Detroit Pistons.

"There are men in your life who make you better, in ways that you might never notice until later," recalled Rick Mahorn, who played for Daly for the Pistons and the New Jersey Nets.

As for coaching . . .

"He would tell us we could come in to practice and get it done in 45 minutes or we could drag it out and the only thing it would make him late for was a tee time," Mahorn said. "I remember one year we were in Boston, an important game, nasty little locker room, one shower head that worked. [Assistant coach] Brendan Suhr put the scouting report on the blackboard and we were looking at it, getting ready.

"Chuck came in, grabbed a towel, erased the whole board and said, 'Y'all know what you need to do. Go do it.' "

Did the Pistons win?

"We did," Mahorn said. "Remember, it was an important game."

And that gathering of coaches in Jupiter a month ago still resonates with Weinhauer.

"We were there, with Terry, with a neighbor of the Dalys, with a priest I only knew as Father Paddy," Weinhauer said. "We were leaving when Terry said she had asked Father Paddy to sing a song for Chuck. He sang 'Danny Boy,' with a voice so good he could have been on Broadway. And then he kissed Chuck on the forehead and said goodbye, that he'd see him soon." *

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