Playing on Injured Knees, Hudson Gambles on Comeback at Las Vegas : Once One of L.A.’s Outstanding High School Basketball Stars, He’s Trying to Regain His Game and His Spot in the Lineup

The scar, clearly visible, extends six inches vertically from the top of Eldridge Hudson’s left kneecap. It serves as a vivid and gruesome reminder of the operation that almost ended the brief yet storied career of the man they call El Hut.

There was a time, not quite three years ago, when Eldridge Hudson was being called California’s most talented prep basketball player. College was considered just a stopover on his way to the NBA. Said Dick Acres, Hudson’s coach at Carson High School: “When the Lord passed out talent, Eldridge cheated to the front of the line.”

All of that, though, was before the cartilage and ligaments in Hudson’s knees began to betray him--before El Hut went under the knife for el cut.

Hudson played in 26 games for the University of Nevada Las Vegas as a freshman in 1982-83. Ten of those were mostly vintage El Hut. He scored 122 points and took down 77 rebounds in the Rebels’ 10-0 start. He played the other 16 mostly on one leg.

On New Year’s Day, 1983, Hudson said, he slipped in some moisture on the floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center and hyperextended his knee. He tried to peg-leg it through the rest of the Rebels’ schedule. By season’s end, his left knee was a messed up mass of damaged tissue. He needed reconstructive surgery. The injury was compared to the one that threatened the career of Laker forward Mitch Kupchak.

“A lot of people thought he’d never play again,” UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian said.

Hudson wasn’t prepared to end his career after one year of college basketball, though. “That was just talk,” he said. “A lot of people said, ‘Well, you might not be able to come back.’ But I didn’t listen to that, because I feel like if you’ve still got the tools the Lord gave you, you use them. And I knew I still had them.

“If I listened to talk, I wouldn’t be anywhere. I’d be a wino on a corner somewhere if I listened to what everybody said. But the talk is always gonna be there.”

After the surgery, Hudson sat out the next season at UNLV and underwent an intense rehabilitation program. For the first time in his life, El Hut had to hit the weights.

“Oh, man, it was deadly,” he recalled. “That’s the most I’ve ever worked out in my whole life. I never worked out in high school. I never worked out when I came here for my freshman year.

“But when I got that injury, woo! Last year, I used to wake up at six o’clock in the morning to go work out. It killed me to wake up at six in the morning, but I had to do it if I wanted to play again.”

Hudson returned to the court this season. He shot 53%, averaged 9.3 points and 3 rebounds in his first three games, and was on the verge of cracking Tarkanian’s starting lineup. “After the Georgetown game (an 82-46 loss), we had moved Ed Catchings out to the wing and I was figuring on Eldridge stepping in as our starter inside,” Tarkanian said.

But Hudson’s knee refused to cooperate. It wasn’t the reconstructed left knee that was bothering him, though, it was the right one, which had grown tired of supporting most of Hudson’s 212 pounds while the other was on the mend. It began swelling. That injury was a little more mysterious than the other one. Even Tarkanian was short of details.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “I think (the doctors) think he had a slight tear in it, and it swelled up on him. He had X-rays and they showed that it’s all right now--I guess. I don’t understand it all.”

Hudson himself was not sure of the extent of the injury. “It was a strain, I guess,” he said as he sat outside the trainer’s room at Thomas and Mack Center, awaiting treatment. “I don’t know what it was. It just started swelling up on me. They said it was something down below the joint.”

Not satisfied with that explanation, he opened the door to the trainer’s room and called out to UNLV trainer Jerry Koloskie. “Hey Jerry, what was it I did to the right knee?”

“You’ve got an inflammation of the fluid in the knee,” Koloskie replied. “From overuse.”

In healthier days, Hudson seemed destined for a pro career. He was the City 4-A Player of the Year at Carson in 1981-82 and led the Colts to the City and state championships. He averaged 20.1 points a game during the regular season, and 25.1 in postseason play. There was no question about his ability to play major-college basketball.

Still, whenever such phrases as “incredible talent” and “explosive, flamboyant crowd-pleaser” were used to describe Hudson, “uncoachable” and “head case” usually followed closely behind. Hudson had an image problem.

Acres, now the coach at Oral Roberts, had his share of problems with the volatile El Hut. “Eldridge is his own worst enemy,” he said in a 1982 interview. “No one can beat Eldridge Hudson in high school, except Eldridge Hudson.”

Bad rap, Hudson claims. To this day, he says he was misunderstood and that the media painted an ugly and inaccurate picture of him during his prep career. “The media’s gonna be there . . . putting people down,” he said. “I don’t listen to them, myself. That’s why I do what I do and they do what they do. I play so they have something to write about. We do it, and they write about it.

“I knew where I was going, and I knew what it took to get there. As far as being uncoachable, there were times when I was up and times when I was down. But I never took it on the basketball court. Out here, I haven’t had a complaint. I try . . . I do anything they tell me to do.”

Tarkanian had heard all the Hudson horror stories, but recruited him anyway. He says he doesn’t regret that decision. “He’s an emotional kid. Sometimes he talks too much and says things he shouldn’t say, but he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Like everyone else, Tarkanian will testify to Hudson’s talent.

“We think--before he got hurt his freshman year--that we might have been the best team in the country,” he said. “We were undefeated, we had just beaten Tennessee by 16, we were playing great ball.

“He got hurt New Year’s Day against Utah. We kept winning after that, but we weren’t the same team. Our coaches and players, to a man, think that we may have won the whole thing that year had he not gotten hurt.”

This year, Hudson may have trouble finding his way into the Rebels’ starting lineup. Tarkanian has plenty of depth in his frontcourt, and Hudson is competing for playing time against 6-foot 8-inch senior Richie Adams; 6-6 junior Anthony Jones, a transfer from Georgetown; 6-8 sophomore Armon Gilliam; 6-6 senior Frank (Spoon) James, and Catchings, a 6-7 senior.

Hudson has appeared in five of the Rebels’ nine games so far, averaging 7.4 points and 2.2 rebounds. He played 26 minutes in UNLV’s 142-140, triple-overtime victory over Utah State Wednesday night that set an NCAA record for total points in one game. Tarkanian played everybody in that game. He didn’t have any choice. Six UNLV players fouled out, the Rebels were down to their last five players by the time it was over, and freshman center Richard Robinson was playing with four fouls.

Hudson had six points and one rebound in that eventful game, hardly vintage El Hut. But Hudson, who has never had much problem where confidence is concerned, says we haven’t seen the last of the Eldridge Hudson of old.

“I feel like I’m gonna bust loose like I did in high school,” he said. “I just feel it in my mind. One game--one game soon--I’m just gonna go crazy.”