IOWA CITY, Iowa – A healthy Luke Recker might have been a
scary prospect for Iowa opponents.
But now, Recker is in street clothes on the sidelines, walking
stiffly because of an immobilizer on his right leg.
|  | | Iowa will miss the hard-charging Luke Recker, left, the rest of the season. |
Recker, who started his career at Indiana and then transferred
to Arizona before coming to Iowa a year ago, went through a bout
of tendinitis in his right knee early in the year. Just as the
tendinitis was clearing up, he suffered a painful bruise on the
same knee against Missouri in the eighth game of the season.
With the joint heavily taped, Recker played through the pain and
led the 14th-ranked Hawkeyes with an 18.1 point scoring average – third in the Big Ten.
It was announced last Friday that he might miss the rest of the
season because of a fractured right knee cap.
"It affected my game for quite some time," Recker said of the
bruise. "That was frustrating to me because I didn't play the way
I wanted.
"I wasn't half the player I thought I could be," he said an
hour before the Ohio State-Iowa game Wednesday night.
For the next several weeks, Recker won't be a player at all. He
says he doesn't know if he'll even be back this year.
While the Hawkeyes fight to stay in the Big Ten title race,
Recker has to wear the immobilizer and undergo high-tech ultra
sound treatment in the hope that he can be back for the conference
tournament that begins March 8.
He's not sure when his knee will be healed enough to play, but
emphasized it would be his decision.
He also stressed that it was his call to try to play through the
painful bruise, even though he couldn't run, cut or jump the way he
wanted to.
"It's always been my decision to play through this," Recker
said. "No way coach (Steve) Alford pushed me through this."
He's not sure whether the tendinitis and then the bruise led to
the fracture.
"You can never tell," he said. "There's no way to know."
Recker said he was shocked when doctors told him the extent of
his injury. He had just burned his old friends and teammates at
Indiana for 27 points in a Jan. 27 game before sitting out the
contest against Minnesota four nights later – the third time he sat
out because of his right knee.
During the next few weeks, Recker said he will help coach the
team and travel with his teammates.
"These guys, it's time for them to step up," he said. "The
freshmen, they've got to stop thinking like they're freshmen.
They're like sophomores now."
The injury is the latest piece of bad luck for Recker. After
leaving Indiana and getting ready to get settled at Arizona, Recker
broke his left wrist and severely cut his head in a July 1999
traffic crash in Colorado that killed one person and left his
former girlfriend in a wheelchair.
"I don't consider this a tragedy," he said.
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