I’ve been in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, all of twenty minutes when I hear my first Nick Saban-is-a-maniac story.

I’m in the office of a man named Steven Rumsey, who rents apartments to students and runs a trash-hauling company. He’s also an ace golfer. Tuscaloosa being a small town, Saban, a golf-addicted transplant, got hooked up with Rumsey, a golf-addicted local, and in the afternoons outside of football and recruiting seasons, the two men like to knock out eighteen holes before dark. Rumsey has likely spent more time with Saban than anyone besides family and assistant coaches since Saban came to Alabama and, I will learn during my time in Tuscaloosa, is one of the few people in town who isn’t terrified of the man.

The story is this: A few days after Alabama beat LSU to win the 2012 national championship, Rumsey and Saban were on the phone together. Most of their conversations take place precisely between 7:12 A.M. and 7:17 A.M., when Saban calls as he drives to work. But this call happened to be in the afternoon. The two men almost never discuss football—Rumsey is the rare Tuscaloosan who doesn’t know or care much about the game, which, he suspects, has something to do with why he and Saban have become friends. But given that his golf buddy had just won the national championship, Rumsey figured he ought to say a few words of congratulations. So he did, telling Saban his team had pulled off an impressive win.

“That damn game cost me a week of recruiting,” Saban grumbled into the phone.

Rumsey at first thought he’d misheard. He asked for clarification. Saban repeated himself. He just knew that while he was preparing for the title game, enduring all the banquets and media bullshit that came with it, some other coach was in the living room of one of his recruits, trying to flip the kid. The thought was making him crazy.

Rumsey pointed out that Saban and his team had just been on national television before millions of people—including, most likely, every high school recruit in the country—and reminded Saban that they had won the national championship.

“I said, ’I’m not sure, but I think that helped you,’” Rumsey recalled. “And he said, ’I just don’t know. Maybe. Maybe that was good.’”

Saban’s pathological drive helps explain why he’s both one of the most successful coaches in American sports and, simultaneously, one of the most polarizing. He has now won four national championships—one at LSU and three over the past four years at Alabama, a coaching run unmatched in college football in more than half a century—and his Crimson Tide team is a preseason favorite to win it all again this year. In the insanely competitive SEC, Saban has been a career-wrecker for opposing coaches: Phillip Fulmer (of Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville and Gene Chizik (of Auburn) all lost their jobs after beatdowns by Saban’s squad. His victory over Florida in the 2009 SEC Championship Game left quarterback Tim Tebow in tears and the Gators’ then head coach Urban Meyer in the hospital, complaining of chest pains.

“The thing that amazes me about him is that he doesn’t let up,” says retired Florida State coach Bobby Bowden. “People start winning, they slack off. But he just keeps jumping on ’complacency, complacency, complacency.’ Most coaches don’t think like that.”

Saban is also among the highest-paid men on a college sideline, raking in more than $5 million a year, and he has rejected attempts to lure him back to the NFL, where he spent two seasons as coach of the Miami Dolphins and where he could easily earn more.

And yet something about Nick Saban bothers a lot of people. The rap is that he’s grandiose and unfeeling, a robot set on “win,” that he’s a hired gun with no particular loyalty to any team or institution. His detractors have their case file. In Miami he once stepped over a convulsing player after practice without acknowledging his presence. Saban was also captured on film screaming at a 300-pound lineman until the poor guy walked away weeping. Saban then enraged Dolphins fans when he left for Alabama after saying he wouldn’t. In the college ranks, he’s been accused of flouting the rules limiting scholarship numbers by encouraging injured players to leave the team. In 2007, he likened a loss to 9/11. The iconic images of Nick Saban after his championship wins are not of a jubilant victor lifting a crystal football over his head but of a coach giving the death stare to players who dared to douse him with Gatorade.

In SEC country, Saban bashing has become a particularly popular pastime. In January, Vanderbilt head coach James Franklin referred to Saban as “Nicky Satan” in front of a group of high school kids. In May, one of Saban’s own former assistants, Tim Davis, now an offensive-line coach at Florida, called Saban “the devil himself” at a booster meeting. In an indication of the sort of loathing Saban inspires, one Orlando Sentinel writer penned a column taking Davis to task not for calling Saban the devil but for later apologizing for it.

Even the Alabama fan base—of which, full disclosure, I’m a lifetime member—holds Saban in a kind of wary embrace. Don’t get me wrong: Alabama fans worship Nick Saban—on campus they have literally rendered him in bronze on a larger-than-life scale, an honor afforded to Tide coaches who win national championships. But as quickly as they—we—might defend him against accusations of actual ties to the underworld, few would ascribe to him the divine qualities projected onto Bear Bryant, a coach who, Alabama fans only half-joke, could walk on water.

Bryant’s appeal came not just from winning games but also from a winning personality. Saban has established himself as a great football coach, but even Alabama fans are still trying to figure him out as a person—or determine if he is one.

I mentioned to one Tide fan I know that I was back home on a quest to find anything that might prove Nick Saban was a human being.

“Well, there’s circumstantial evidence,” he deadpanned. “But no proof.”

My first meeting with Saban—at a charity golf tournament he’s hosting in Mobile—suggests I won’t get much help from the man himself. I’m scheduled to spend the day with him on the twelfth tee, where Saban will play with each foursome as it rolls through. It’s obvious he wants nothing to do with me. For four hours, we stand on the same golf tee with next to no interaction. I approach, he drifts away. I listen in, he stops talking. The situation is too fluid—there are too many “external factors,” Saban’s term for all the forces in the world out to trip you up—for him to feel comfortable. After watching Saban go through half a pouch of Red Man Golden Blend chewing tobacco and hit the same tee shot a couple dozen times, I close my notebook and sit on a bench. A moment later, he sits down next to me and fles the corners of his mouth slightly, in what for Saban constitutes a smile. “Bored yet?” he asks.

The next day, I visit his office in the University of Alabama football building—a redbrick structure that abuts the Tide’s new 37,000-square-foot weight room—unsure of what to expect. Saban gravely invites me in and motions me toward the seating area where he meets with recruits and their families. On brass easels to my right are three framed photographs of his Alabama championship teams on the White House steps with President Obama. “Want your son to meet the president?” the photos all but declare. “Let him play for me.”

Saban tucks into the corner of a wingback armchair and seems, if not relad, at least more at ease. He’s in control now. He has limited external factors. I’ve been told that Saban enters every meeting, however trivial, with a sense of purpose, and in short order he makes clear that the purpose of our meeting is to set the record straight about Nick Saban the man. For one thing, Nick Saban doesn’t enjoy being compared to the devil. He doesn’t think it’s funny, perhaps because it hits too close to home.

“It used to upset me,” he says. “I would come and say to my wife, ’I’m not like that at all. Why do these guys say I’m that way?’ And she would say, ’You ever watch yourself in a press conference?’ You can blame the other guy for saying it, or you can look at yourself and say, ’I must have contributed to this.’”

And yet Saban, now entering his seventh season at Alabama and soon to be a grandfather, insists that the caricature of him as Lucifer in a headset no longer applies.

“I think I’m pretty misunderstood, because I’m not just about football,” he tells me. “I’m kind of portrayed as this one-dimensional person who—this is everything to me.” He gestures toward the football building around him. “I almost feel like I’m not that way at all.”

On a 90-degree Tuscaloosa morning a few days later, Saban is prowling the practice field beneath his wide-brimmed straw hat. While the Crimson Tide players are back home or taking summer classes, Saban is hosting 1,000 football players under the age of 15 at Alabama’s annual youth camp.

Most big-time head coaches leave camp duty to assistants—the daylong photo session with every last camper is considered ertion enough—but in Saban’s mind that wouldn’t be right. He has a saying: Right is never wrong. It means, in essence, there is only one way to do things: the correct way. A Nick Saban Football Camp without a great deal of Nick Saban would be something short of entirely right and is therefore, to Saban, unthinkable.

Saban applies this principle to all aspects of his life. Back before they had money, his wife, Terry, says, she was all set to buy a cheap piano when Saban objected. He was so appalled by the thought of shelling out for a poorly made instrument that he insisted they splurge for the quality model they could barely afford. They spent three years making $68 monthly payments until they owned it outright.