Last year, a professor at the University of Colorado reached out to their football head coach, Deion Sanders, with a complaint that some of the team’s players had disrespected him in class. Many coaches would have given a talking to those guilty or shrugged the case off entirely. But not Coach Prime.

Instead, he gave his players dress codes and classroom etiquette that were to be followed if they wanted to represent the Buffaloes. Behind all the strictness, though, he wanted the best for his players. Just like he experienced growing up in Fort Myers, Florida. But when his son Deion Sanders Jr. was asked if he would ever be like his father, he had an explanation ready.

“That’s what he is, He’s a black-and-white type of person, bro,” Deion Sanders Jr. confessed about his dad on Flexaveli’s YouTube channel. “It’s either going to be this, or it’s going to be nothing.

“But then, you watch documentaries on, say, Michael Jordan, even Steve Jobs, people who just changed the world in their field or made an impact on this world, just through their work and everything, you really just ask the question, like, ‘Is that required for greatness?'”

Whether required or not, having fun and being carefree simply wasn’t how Sanders was raised. In fact, he had a very turbulent upbringing. Raised primarily by his mother, he did not grow up in the best of neighborhoods. Fort Myers, Florida, was a hub of violence, poverty, and drugs. It was a norm for kids in the neighborhood to be exposed to the local drug trade, but Coach Prime found a lifeline in sports.

Knowing the kind of neighborhood he was in, his coaches demanded strict accountability from him. At age eight, he joined a Pop Warner football league and played for the Fort Myers Rebels. If there is just one reputation Pop Warner has to date, it is for being the only national youth sports organization that requires its participants to maintain specific academic standards to play.

It makes it easy to deduce where Coach Prime’s insistent demands for academic excellence and his zero tolerance for classroom misbehaviors from his players come from, just like what he did last year:

“If I see you in slides on campus, it’s going to be a problem,” Sanders said in a video posted by his son, Deion Sanders Jr. “If I see you with a hoodie on in class, with headphones on in class, it’s going to be a problem. If I see you sitting in the back of the classroom, it’s going to be a problem.”

The discipline, accountability, strictness, and academic excellence soon became more important to Sanders when he moved to the NFL. During his playing days, Sanders’ discipline in studying, practicing, and watching film was unmatched by any of his teammates, as one of them pointed out, per ESPN.

“We couldn’t even get any reps in practice because Deion would take them all,” said former Cowboys cornerback Kevin Mathis, a coaching intern with Dallas this summer. “He practiced like it was a game. He treated football like a job. He had fun, but he took it seriously.”

Deion Sanders Jr. mentioned Michael Jordan and Steve Jobs as great men who shared characteristics with his father. Regarding Jordan, his former teammate BJ Armstrong, in an exclusive interview with SkySports, noted that discipline was his main gift. Not his talent, not his personality, but discipline.

With Steve Jobs, his focus was the key factor. Legendary former Apple design chief Jony Ive described Jobs as “the most focused person he has ever met.” Apparently, Deion Sanders Jr.’s conclusion was correct: discipline is common among great people.

But Deion Sanders’ level of discipline has not come without its extremes. Former Buffs Eoghan Kerry and Caiden Robertson told Jason Whitlock on Blaze TV that Sanders was unapproachable and unresponsive, even when one of the pair was alone with him in an elevator. That was all because he was in the mindset to achieve something. And what he did achieve was greatness. And being black and white just might be the greatest gift he would forward to his players.