This Sunday, former 1985 backup linebacker Chicago Bear Ron Rivera, 54, will command the Carolina Panthers as their head coach in the fiftieth consecutive Super Bowl game in Santa Clara, California.

Not many professional football coaches get the opportunity to say they reached the pinnacle of any American football career — the NFL’s deluxe championship game — a lengthy and trying quest that takes discipline, patience, diligence, intelligence and of course: hard work. And a lot of it.

In a lot of ways, it’s something that growing up around United States military members would help prepare you for, as many of those same traits exist in the men and women who proudly wear the uniforms of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Well, it just so happens that Rivera did grow up in a military family. His father was a Puerto Rican commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, and while he raised Ron he moved the family around to a host of military installations in Washington DC, Panama, Maryland and even Germany.

Here’s the current Panther football boss talking about his American military childhood and more in the following clip: