FAYETTEVILLE — Jennifer Clark was confident her son would intercept a pass and return it for a score.
It was simply a gut feeling, a prediction she made that was relayed to a number of her friends between Arkansas’ controversial loss at Auburn on Oct. 10 and the home date with Ole Miss the following Saturday.
The hunch did not completely come to fruition. The latter will have to wait a little while longer.
But what unfolded for the Razorbacks defensively against the Rebels went down as one of the more impressive performances in program history. And Hudson Clark, a redshirt freshman walk-on cornerback from Highland Park in Dallas, planted himself firmly in the middle of it all.
“After the first interception,” Jennifer said, “we’re all like, ‘Yeah, OK. He said he would do it and he did it.’”
Late in the third quarter, Hudson made another play, jumping an out route in Arkansas territory for his second interception of Ole Miss quarterback Matt Corral. Suddenly, a host of friends made over the last two years while following the team came rushing to the Clark family’s seats in Section 107 to celebrate.
There were hugs all around, too many high fives to count and plenty of screams. Little did they know their already euphoric afternoon wasn’t finished.
The redshirt freshman capped his magical day with a third interception of Corral on a long cross-field pass near the Ole Miss sideline with less than two minutes remaining. There’s no way that just happened, his mother thought.
“On the third one, for me, I just kind of sat there,” she said. “We were just kind of in shock. It was kind of a blur to us. After that third one, for me, I was wiped out.
“My brain was not working. It was foggy.”
Hudson was immediately a national story.
He was the largely unknown walk-on who burst onto the college football scene with a performance that seemingly only a fiction writer could detail. After a 10-minute interview session with the media came the locker room celebration with teammates.
He then spent the next several hours eating Tony’s New York Style Pizza and getting peppered with questions from everyone at the home of one of Jennifer's sorority sisters. At 11 a.m. Sunday, he met his grandparents at Catfish Hole.
By the end of the weekend, Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman had informed him he would be placed on scholarship in January. The first-year head coach had specific instructions, too: Keep it to yourself for now.
His parents learned the news the following morning on social media.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Travis said. “The next thing I saw was a picture of he and Trevor (Lawrence) as offensive and defensive player of the week. I thought that was some sort of meme. Hudson is next to the Clemson quarterback. Then I called him Monday, maybe he was on his class, and he called me back maybe 20 minutes later.
“I said, ‘Is there anything you want to tell me?’ He said, ‘Oh, you saw? Yeah, it’s really cool.’ That’s him. … I can’t say what happens in the future, but down to earth is an understatement. Not too high, not too low.”
Early in his teenage years, Hudson had an offer to attend the youth soccer school in Holland.
Initially, Travis and Jennifer thought soccer was the direction he would take with sports. He began playing at just 3 years old.
The parents signed up their daughter, Anna, who now attends the University of Texas, to be trained by a soccer coach in Dallas. All of her friends were training with the coach, but she didn’t truly love the game.
Shortly after arriving at the workout session, Anna sat down and opted not to participate. Determined to get something out of the trip, Jennifer told Hudson to go kick the ball around with the kids in attendance.
“(The coach) ended up putting Hudson on one of his 6-year-old teams at 3.5-4 years old,” she said. “In kindergarten, the coach would say, ‘Stay right here until I tap your shoulder or I look at you, then you can run and get the ball.’ Otherwise, he was the one scoring every single goal and running all over the field.
“He had such intuition on the field at that age that they just held him back, and when they tapped him on the shoulder and let him go, he scored. He knew the field, he learned the field that early. It was fun to watch.”
The toughest decisions his parents had to make when it came to Hudson revolved around eliminating sports. He could play almost any of them and play them well, Travis said.
He ultimately chose to stick with football, basketball and track.
Thanks in part to his days playing soccer, Hudson's footwork on the football field was a plus and allowed him to more than hold his own at cornerback against some of the best high school competition Texas had to offer. He intercepted nine passes in his final season at Highland Park and added 14 defended passes to go with a pair of picks as a junior.
It has not gone unnoticed to Travis that Auburn and Ole Miss favored his son’s side of the field early on the last two weeks.
“I’m glad, you know? At some point they’ll stop going against him and targeting him,” he said. “They’ll learn until then. Keep going. They’ll learn he can jump. That’s his secret recipe.
"And he just kind of wills things to happen. I don’t know another way to explain it.”
For Travis and Jennifer, the text messages and phone calls have come in by the hundreds since Saturday. Auburn offensive coordinator Chad Morris was among those to reach out to both of them. Pittman said Travis sent him a nice note after the scholarship news.
But one message, courtesy of one of Jennifer’s friends, stood out to her above the rest:
It just couldn’t have happened to someone more perfect and more humble.
On Wednesday, Travis stopped by Highland Park High School to visit longtime football coach Randy Allen. Allen expressed how proud he was of his former standout cornerback, but he stopped short of saying he was surprised by his success.
That sentiment falls in line with the rest of the community.
“Everybody is so excited for him,” Jennifer said. “They know his dedication, and they know him and how hard he works. Even in high school football he was doing extra time in film and studying and all that. He took it seriously — a lot more seriously than some others, I’ll say.”
Through all of the various accolades — SEC freshman of the week, Jim Thorpe Award player of the week — and recognition thrown his way in recent days, Pittman has not seen a single change in his famous walk-on. Pittman concurs with the parents’ “down to earth” characterization of their son.
“He’s a very quiet, very modest young man,” Pittman said Thursday. “I think he’s taken all this stuff in stride. I mean, he’s gotten enough awards this week. But, I see on my sheet of paper that he is one of the three Boss Hog Scholars of the week that we give out each week.
“So, that adds to his resume for this week as well.”