When he isn’t coaching, he isn’t so different from a lot of other older Black men from the South. He prefers to spend his free time in the middle of nowhere, fishing on his off days. He listens to a lot of old-school R&B and soul music, artists like Curtis Mayfield and Heatwave. He lives in sweats and prefers to shave off what would be a white beard. A recent empty nester, Sanders had found a way to keep his grown children close to him at Jackson State. His daughter Shelomi joined the basketball team. His middle son, Shilo, would play safety, and his youngest son, Shedeur, was the star quarterback. His eldest son, 29-year-old Deion Jr., is with him 24/7 and runs his social media.
In some ways, he’s come a long way from Prime Time and Neon Deion. In his playing days, Sanders was a firecracker: brash, charismatic, stubborn, divisive, sometimes alienating to his teammates and the media. He was also unquestionably gifted. Troy Aikman, the Cowboys icon and a close friend, told me that all the bombast and athleticism often obscured his work ethic, his discipline. “I remember going in the locker room before games, and he would be over there, studying film right up until we took the field,” said Aikman. “This was before the iPad, and no one was doing that. So I think it’s hard to be as great and a transcendent player just purely on talent. As talented as he was, he worked hard at his craft.”
Sanders has long understood the power of attention, which, early in his career, led to the invention of Prime Time: the silky Jheri curl, the brick-size cell phone, and so much gold—rings, dollar sign earrings, piles of chains around his neck. The character was larger than life. “That was just me doing me,” he said when I asked him about his fashion choices back then. “Never had no stylist.” He was always pushing the envelope of the dress code. Sometimes, he told me, he’d wear a diamond bracelet on the field…just to see what the league would let him get away with. “But I never went against what was right,” he said. “I would always walk right up to the line because it was making a statement as well.”
Prime Time was everywhere in the ’90s. He was friends with MC Hammer, became one of the few athletes to host Saturday Night Live, and even recorded a rap album that included “Must Be the Money,” one of the indelible cultural artifacts of the decade. Oftentimes, the media had a difficult time making sense of him, particularly white sports writers. (A 1995 Sports Illustrated profile described the “elaborate fiction of his Prime Time persona” as a form of “Prime Time jive.”) But Sanders liked to keep it moving. It often seemed as if he was trying to leave a mark wherever he could. “My sense is Deion, like all of us at a young age, we were all chasing something,” said Aikman. “He’s talked about coming from humble beginnings and taking care of his mom and wanting to buy her a house. In order to do all that, then he had to really make his mark in athletics. Obviously, he did that tenfold.