Irwin Smallwood was a golf writer, sports editor and editor for the Greensboro (N.C.) News & Record for nearly a half century. For most of that time, Cleola Hudson worked for the Smallwood family as a housekeeper and other duties.
Segregation still had a strong hold on the South in the early 1960s. "We weren't really covering the black high schools at that time," said Smallwood, now 88. "Mrs. Hudson told me a few times that she had a son who played basketball, and she thought he was pretty good at it, and that I might want to go to Dudley High School and watch him.
"I did that, and her son was bringing the ball up the court, and making shots, and getting above everyone for rebounds, and I went back to the office and said, 'Gentlemen, there's quite a basketball player over at Dudley named Lou Hudson.'
"Bones McKinney, the coach at Wake Forest, would have loved to have Lou, but it was just a couple of years too early for that down here. Bones told his good friend John Kundla about Lou, and that's how he wound up at Minnesota."
Lou Hudson, among the greatest of all Gophers basketball players, died Friday at age 69 while in hospice care in Atlanta. He had suffered a stroke on March 24.
Hudson had a previous stroke in 2005 that had left him needing a wheelchair or other aids to get around.
"I talked to Lou a couple of months ago and he was rehabbing every day and feeling good about the progress he was making," Smallwood said. "He said, 'We're going to play a round of golf before this summer is over.' "
Mardi Hudson, Lou's wife, said he suffered the stroke while lifting arm weights on the deck of his place in Atlanta. "The terrible thing about all of this has been to see him there in the hospice, looking so darn good," she said. "Lou had been working out four, five times a day, getting stronger."