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Few people in Baton Rouge are more well known than Dale Brown. But even fewer have hung out with as many famous people than the former LSU basketball coach.

After all, how many people do you know who have visited the late Mother Teresa in Calcutta? Or had dinner with the first President Bush? Or who claim such names as Norman Vincent Peale, John Wooden, Bob Richards and legendary Soviet basketball coach Aleksander Gomelski as friends?

Brown’s personal who’s who started when he got into coaching.

“It wasn’t stargazing or hero worship, but a quest for knowledge,” he says. “When I became a college coach, I wanted to learn from the best in the business. So I made a list.”

The best public speaker he’d heard was Bob Richards, the Olympic decathlete. Brown saw him on a box of Wheaties and said, “I’ve got to meet him. I’ve got to pick his brain and find out how he got so good and how he lifted people.”

Who’s the most motivational person he’s met? Norman Vincent Peale. “Father of positive thinking.

“Then I went into the coaching profession. Who’s the most successful coach? John Wooden.”

He didn’t stop there.

“Entertainment? Bob Hope and Lawrence Welk,” Brown says. “I contacted every one of them and every one of them was so gracious and gave me so much time.”

Brown was just out of college when he met Jesse Owens, who spoke at a banquet at his old high school in Minot, N.D. Owens was the first famous person he’d met.

“After meeting him that really stimulated me,” he says. And he’s known seemingly every famous sports person from his home state, from baseball great Roger Maris, to Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson (against whom Brown competed in high school), to the aforementioned orchestra leader, Welk.

Brown sought out “different people, not necessarily famous. The idea was to learn, not necessarily meet famous people.”

His travels helped him meet even more people. He was hired at LSU 35 years ago this past March. He coached the Tigers for 25 years, putting LSU basketball on the map as he took his team to the 1981 and 1986 Final Fours, all the while making those who knew him think outside the box as he—and this is actually a short list—climbed the Matterhorn, spent a week in the Amazon jungle, climbed down the ruins of the tower or Babel in Babylon, visited the pyramids, Killing Fields of Cambodia and the Great Wall in China, and visited almost all of Eastern Europe at one time or another as he accompanied his wife, Vonnie, a noted folk dancer.

Brown has known TV interviewer Larry King, baseball commissioner Happy Chandler, baseball legend Tommy Lasorda, actor Mickey Rooney, evangelist Oral Roberts, political activist Dick Gregory, legendary Grambling football coach Eddie Robinson and musician Al Hirt. And he and Wynton Marsalis share the same agent.

On a shelf in his office is a picture of actor Matthew McConaughey, who found Brown to pick his brain before acting in the football movie We Are Marshall. There’s another picture with Sammy Sosa. Brown was in the Dominican Republic visiting and was invited to the baseball player’s birthday party.

Brown sold one set of autographed pictures for $10,000 to an auctioneer, money he put into the Dale Brown Foundation that has done more than its share of charity donations over the years.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have good friends,” he says. Just consider the basketball list: Shaquille O’Neal, Ray Meyer, Pete Newell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the Maravich family and Al McGuire.

A few years ago, Brown considered entering politics in North Dakota. The list of Republicans he dealt with included John Ashcroft, Tom Delay, Bill Frist and George Allen, before he decided against it. “I would have been a one-termer,” he says humbly, “that’s for sure.”

Strangely, as Brown enters his 70s, he’s taken off the wall some of his autographed pictures and even sold some that formerly hung in his Baton Rouge office.

His definition of heroes and celebrity has changed over the years, of course. Just recently, Brown says, he put a picture of his late mother into a frame and put it on his desk at home. She raised him through poverty, a single mother working extra jobs in a desolate railroad town with brutal winters.

“I never thought of her as a hero, but she taught me all my lessons,” he says.

And you might wonder if Brown, who has visited 90 countries, has met royalty.

“No kings or queens,” he says with a smile. “Only Vonnie.”