Woody Hayes used to have a saying. He would drop it into his conversations all the time.

"You can never pay back," he would say. "So you should always try to pay forward."

I never understood precisely what he meant-the words sounded good, but I wasn't certain of their meaning.

But in the years since Hayes' death I have come to learn that the "paying forward" line was not some empty slogan for him. It was the credo by which he lived his life-and now the dividends of his having paid forward are becoming ever more evident.

It happened again the other day. I heard from a man named Robert Ryan, who lives in Hilton Head, S.C. Like so many other people, Ryan was well aware of Hayes' reputation as a belligerent, angry-tempered football coach. That's the reputation Hayes lived with through 28 years as head coach at Ohio State University-through 205 victories, 13 Big 10 championships, eight trips to the Rose Bowl. Right up until the day he was dismissed after the 1978 season for slugging a Clemson player during the Gator Bowl, Hayes was considered a one-dimensional man by millions who knew him only through his much-publicized outbursts.

Whatever flaws he may have had, though, Woody Hayes was paying forward virtually every day of his life. Which is where Robert Ryan's story comes in.

"During the Vietnam war, my brother-in-law was in the infantry," Ryan said. "His name was Paul Allen Ballard. He was seriously wounded twice-and then, a few days before he was due to come home to Ohio, he was killed by a land mine.

"Anyway, in 1968, after his second wounding, he was in the hospital over there. And several weeks later, on a Saturday morning, there was a ring at his mother's front door in Grandview, Ohio.

"The way she described it, a portly, graying man in a suit was standing at her door. He tipped his hat and introduced himself as Woody Hayes."

Now, it should be noted that in 1968, Woody Hayes was perhaps the most famous man in Ohio. But there were still some Ohioans who did not follow sports-and who did not immediately know who Hayes was. Marie Ballard, the soldier's mother, evidently was one of these people: "She knew the man had a name she should recognize, but she couldn't place it," Robert Ryan said.

Hayes told Mrs. Ballard that he had just visited her son in the hospital in Vietnam, and had promised the young man he would let his family know he was all right. Hayes had come to the house to do just that-and to bring photos of Paul Allen Ballard.

So Mrs. Ballard invited him in-she still didn't know who he was-and she asked him what he did for a living. "I'm a football coach up at the university," Hayes said.

He spent 15 minutes filling Mrs. Ballard in on her son, and left the pictures with her. It turned out that Hayes had been in Vietnam under the auspices of the State Department, and had visited Ohio boys, especially those in hospitals, so that he could serve as a courier to their families back home. He had wanted no publicity about this; volunteer student drivers from Ohio State took him all around Ohio so that he could call on the families.

"I find this story to be a towering measure of the real Woody Hayes," Robert Ryan said. "I'll tell you this-there's at least one family who will never forget what he did."

I hear stories like that about Hayes all the time. Since his death in 1987, I have run into dozens of people who were touched by his private acts of kindness-acts of kindness that were never reported.

On Christmas Eve I was in Columbus, and I called Anne Hayes, Woody's widow, to wish her the best of the season. I told her the story that Robert Ryan had told me.

"Yes, I know," she said. "It was very important to Woody to visit those families. He said that the boys were making such a sacrifice, it was the least he could do."

I reminded her of the "paying forward" line. "He wouldn't want to take credit for that," she said. "One of his favorite essayists was Ralph Waldo Emerson-it was from Emerson's writings that he learned the concept of paying forward. Woody wouldn't want to claim it as his own."

Wherever he learned it, he learned it well. So many people try in vain to determine and control their own legacy. Woody Hayes seemed to have figured it out: Pay forward, and everything else will take care of itself.