ATLANTA — Broncos fans certainly know what made former cornerback Champ Bailey a Pro Football Hall of Famer.

His lock-down defense. His 12 Pro Bowl selections. His famous 100-yard interception return in the playoffs to help beat the Patriots.

But Bailey's story began long before he arrived in Denver in 2004.

The Folkston, Georgia, native began to show flashes of greatness long before that, and there may be no better person to explain Bailey's brilliance than the man who coached him in college.

Jim Donnan's first season at Georgia was 1996 — the same year that Bailey started playing for the Bulldogs — and he racked up plenty of memories with the UGA great.

As Bailey approaches enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, take a moment to relive some of the finest moments of his collegiate career. These stories, as much as what he did in his pro career, help explain why Bailey was destined to earn a place in Canton, Ohio.

Because, as Donnan said in Athens during Super Bowl week, "if you're going to have a Hall of Fame, it'd be hard to have it without Champ Bailey in it."

A SURPRISE PHONE CALL

"I don't know if a lot people know about his background, but he grew up in Folkston, Georgia, which is right across the border from Florida — very close to the Florida line — so the University of Florida was recruiting him extremely hard. He had an older brother, Ronald, who was already on the team [at Georgia] who was a corner, and I hadn't recruited him at all for Marshall [where Donnan was previously head coach], but when I got here, one of the first things I did was go down to watch him play a high-school basketball game. The family was very pro-Georgia, so that helped a little bit. But he wanted to know what our situation [was] going to be, where we're going to play him and all that.

"An interesting kind of scenario: We're eating dinner there at the house, and he's got this sister named Danielle — whose nickname is 'Doll' — and Boss Bailey, his other brother who ended up playing in the pros [but] was just a 10th grader, [who were both there and] the phone kept ringing. And sometimes coaches know you're there and they try to disrupt the recruiting process a little bit, and it was [Florida] Coach [Steve] Spurrier. I didn't know at the time, but 'Doll' would go over there and whisper to her mother. It rang about three times, and finally, the last time, Ms. Bailey picked up the phone and said, 'Coach Spurrier, this is Ms. Bailey, and I just want to tell you you're worrying me, and I'm going to tell you right now, Champ's going to Georgia.'