Charles Woodson

The baby laughed and splashed as he always did. Charles Woodson was 6 months old and loved his bath. His mother smiled. Then, for the first time, she noticed his arches.

"They just didn't look the way they should," Georgia Woodson recalls.

Charles was diagnosed as having clubbed feet.

For the better part of the next year, Charles Woodson wore leg braces. They secured his legs to each other, preventing him from walking.

"We had to carry him because he had to wear leg braces all day," his mother says. "He basically couldn't walk at all."

Until he was 4, he had to wear corrective shoes. Kids being kids, he was teased.

"He didn't want to wear them," Georgia says. "He fought it."

Woodson has been fighting--and winning--ever since. He went on to become Ohio's best high school football player, then an All-American at Michigan. Now he has won the Heisman Trophy.

He already had earned the Walter Camp award, also honoring the nation's top college football player. Only five times since the award was first given in 1967 has the Camp award gone to someone who didn't win the Heisman.

Still, the odds were against Woodson. A defensive player had never won the Heisman.

"If the Heisman doesn't come around, it doesn't," Woodson said prior to the announcement. "I'll still be happy."

That is exactly what his mother would expect him to say. She says her son was always "laid-back and quiet, so much so you never knew he was in the room."

The child from a devoutly Pentecostal house never caused trouble. And he honored his mother's directives to do his homework before play.

"He was never a 'Me, me, me' person,"' his mother says. "It was always 'What can we do as a team."'

Woodson has little recollection of the braces and shoes of his toddler years.

"I just found out about it a couple of years ago," he says. "But I'm glad that my mother and father caught it early."

His legs were fine by the time Rex Radeloff, the biology teacher and retired football coach at Ross High School in Fremont, Ohio, first saw Woodson in seventh grade.

"He made things happen," Radeloff says. "He's one player I'll never forget."

When he arrived in Ann Arbor, the coaches assumed Woodson would want to play offense.

"I told them defense was my first choice," Woodson says. "In 10th grade, I started playing defense. Mainly because we already had a great tailback. Once I started playing it, it just started growing on me. I liked it a lot.