The face-to-face visits came on a regular basis, never lasting more than a few minutes.

Lloyd Carr would be in his office and Red Simmons would stick his head in the Michigan football coach's doorway followed by three words.

"Got a minute?" Simmons would ask.

One meeting in 1995 proved memorable for a first-year head football coach, who two years later would lead the Wolverines to a co-national championship.

Simmons - then 85 - walked into Carr's office and handed him a medal.

The medal, attached to a colorful ribbon, was awarded to Simmons somewhere in his illustrious competitive track and field career.

Three words are inscribed on the back of the medal: "Friends. Family. Health."

"When you're done coaching," Simmons told Carr that day, "make sure you've got those three things and that you keep them with you."

The words stuck with Carr, who now serves as an associate athletic director at Michigan after 13 years at the helm of Michigan's football program.

"I never forgot that during the course of my coaching career," Carr said on Saturday. "A lot of times, the advice Red gave me that day would just come to me, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life."

Carr met Simmons when was a student at Riverview High School. Simmons rememberd, and naturally became a regular to Carr's office.

"I told him, 'You're going to have a lot of friends now and your new friends are going to tell you where to spend your money,'" Simmons recalled last week. "I told him, 'Take so much of it and stick it in the bank every time you get it.'"

Simmons then shifted his message from money to loyalty.

"Coaching won't last - you'll have bad years, good years and a lot of friends will drop you if you lose," Simmons said. "I just tried to give him some advice I had learned from life."

During his retirement speech after the 2007 season, Carr thanked Simmons, looking back on the day when the man who is widely known as the founding father of women's track at Michigan stopped by.

Simmons keeps a photo of himself taken with Carr at a social function in a collection of memorabilia he keeps in his Ann Arbor home. Written on the photo: "Thanks for the advice."

"I always knew what he meant by that," Simmons said.

Carr appreciates the life lessons that the now 99-year-old former coach passed along. And although many like Carr weren't directly associated with Simmons' pioneering of helping create competitive opportunities for female athletes at Michigan, the impact is just as great.

"He's obviously a remarkable man in a lot of different ways," Carr said. "And I don't think you can pigeonhole his legacy unless you sat down and talked to every one he has ever come in contact with and had an impact on.

"And that would be difficult to do."

Jeff Arnold covers sports for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at jeffarnold@annarbor.com or 734-623-2554. Follow him on Twitter @jeffreyparnold.