Meeting him, that voice is what you’re going to notice straight away,” says “Marvellous” Marvin Addy, a British basketball player, now coach. He’s talking about Jimmy Rogers, a legend of the sport in this country, sometimes known as “The Bishop of Brixton”. Addy goes on: “It sounds like God talking. Deep, very deep, as soon as he speaks everyone in the whole sports hall will hear it. He can’t whisper ... couldn’t whisper to save his life.”

Addy drifts between past and present, perhaps without even realising it. On Monday it was announced that the 78-year-old Rogers, the long-time coach of the Brixton Topcats basketball team, had died, six months after being diagnosed with lung cancer, and Addy still seems in disbelief. Alton Byrd, another former player brought through by Rogers, also noted his famous boom. “Never has a man meant so much to an area, to a club, and to a generation of young men and women,” Byrd wrote on Twitter. “His voice, both literally and physically, was a clarion call to all young men and women who wanted to participate and learn about discipline and hustle.”

Rogers’s favoured invocation was: “Drive the body!” Those words were recalled this week by Luol Deng, the most famous alumnus of the Brixton Topcats. Deng met Rogers when he was 11, not long after his family arrived in south London from Sudan, having been granted political asylum from the civil war there. Deng was obsessed with football, fancied himself as the next Faustino Asprilla, but Rogers convinced him not to give up on basketball just yet. He was right: Deng is now entering his 15th season in the NBA, a two-time All-Star who has represented the Chicago Bulls, LA Lakers and presently the Minnesota Timberwolves.

But what does “Drive the body!” even mean? “Oh, that saying rings in every Brixton player’s head,” replies Addy, with a wry laugh. “If you’re at the gym you’ll push one more time; if you’re running lengths you’ll go another length; if you’re going through hard times in life you just get up. So I think that’s what he’s done for everyone.”

Luol Deng spent a decade with the Chicago Bulls from 2004 to 2014. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/Guardian

So far we’ve only touched on basketball, but Rogers’s reach went far beyond sport. He started working in Brixton in 1981, a few months after the April riots. Buffered by a small grant from Lambeth council, which soon ran out, the goal of the basketball programme was in part to make the local teenagers less “riot-prone”, in the words of Courtenay Griffiths, a barrister who was Rogers’s partner in the endeavour. To provide them with an activity, a distraction from life in an area where unemployment among black youths was estimated to be more then 50%. Playing sport, Rogers hoped, could make a meaningful improvement to their self-worth. The “Topcat” tag came from the cartoon character, forever on the run from the police.

Rogers’s beliefs stemmed from his own background. His mother was from the Caribbean, his father an American merchant seaman, but he was born in Wales in 1939. His early years were spent in an orphanage in Newcastle upon Tyne, where a teacher introduced him to basketball. He became serious about the sport when he joined the army aged 15; he became a fitness trainer for his regiment and later played professionally in West Germany and made the British Olympic team in 1968.

As a coach – first in Liverpool, where he worked with kids in Toxteth, and then London – Rogers leant heavily on his military experience. His sessions were legendarily gruelling. Deng has said that he’s never run as much as he did in Brixton. Others remember Rogers chasing them down the court and throwing his hat at them in frustration.

This week, on social media, there have been countless testimonies from individuals describing the life-changing work ethic that training with Rogers instilled. Many come from professional basketball players, but others grew up in Brixton and went on to become lawyers, teachers, journalists or musicians. “There are many men and women who have just lost their dad,” reads one.

Jimmy Rogers interviewed in 2016. Video: Hoopsfix.com

No one sugarcoats the fact that Rogers could be hard, even uncompromising. He insisted on humility, grace in victory or defeat. Addy compares him to The Karate Kid’s Mr Miyagi: only much later would you understand why he was drilling you in a particular way. “We’ve had our ups and downs,” wrote Matthew Bryan-Amaning, a British international who first met Rogers aged four, 26 years ago. “I remember days where I hated u but now realise I hated u because you wanted me to be better and couldn’t see it at the time.”

If you’ve never heard of Rogers that says something for the profile of basketball in Britain. He himself complained that we were basically a “third world” country in the sport, mainly because we spent too little on developing coaches and players and too much on administrators. Despite there being countless eulogies online, no national newspapers ran an obituary detailing Rogers’s film-worthy life this week.

Certainly, basketball did not bring Rogers great financial rewards personally. In 2013, he was threatened with eviction by Lambeth council from the two-bedroom flat in Brixton he had lived in for more than 30 years. The flat had originally been supplied as a “shortlife” property and now needed to be sold as part of a move to recoup £450m in lost government funding. It was only complaints from, among others, Kate Hoey, the Labour MP for Vauxhall, and Deng that allowed him to stay. “Jimmy is Brixton,” said Deng simply.

Nevertheless, Rogers often used to insist that he was “rich”. Addy, and others, were always bemused by the statement. “But I get it now,” he says, as if still in conversation with Rogers. “What you created is not for sale and cannot be bought.”

When he was asked to sum up his coaching philosophy, Rogers once said: “Having a winning attitude. It’s not about winning the game of basketball, it’s about winning the game of life.”

On the evidence of this week, he succeeded again and again, beyond his wildest dreams. Around Britain this weekend, there will be a minute’s silence at basketball matches. After that, there will be a funeral that will bring together a huge swathe of south London and beyond. “That will be something else,” predicts Addy. “I don’t think it can be a small venue.”