“Peter Perfect” as his two younger siblings referred to him – due to his ability to excel at most things he tried – was naturally skilled at many sports, including cricket, basketball, squash and tennis. But it was football that really captured Hudson’s attention and he has fond memories of sitting on his back fence, which bordered the local footy oval, spending hours watching teams train and play.

Of course Hudson went on to become one of Australia’s greatest and best-loved football stars due to his extraordinary career with Hawthorn in the late 1960s and 1970s, and remains one of the most celebrated figures in Australian sporting history.

The now 76-year-old was a prolific goal kicker who broke a string of records during his remarkable career. No VFL or AFL player has averaged more goals per game than Hudson, who played 129 games for Hawthorn and kicked 727 goals – an average of 5.64 goals per game. He is one of only two men (the other is Bob Pratt) to have kicked 150 goals in a single season.

Despite these impressive sporting achievements, Hudson says he never imagined he’d have a newly-released book – A Football Genius: The Peter Hudson Story – written about his life. Or that he would be immortalised in bronze in a statue in his home town, which was unveiled at New Norfolk’s Arthur Square last year.

But a modest Hudson admits that while he wouldn’t have actively pursued such public recognition, he’s quietly chuffed that his achievements have been honoured in such long-lasting ways.

“You don’t put your hand up and say can I please have a statue of me in the town where I grew up,’’ Hudson says. “But when it’s done you think ‘gee, that’s a great honour that people would bother to do that’.

“I think the book’s a bit the same. That’s how I think about anything I’ve been able to do in footy, it’s been a privilege and an honour and I appreciate it so much. You don’t ask for these things but gee, when they come along, they’re nice.’’

The book, released on April 1, recounts Hudson’s early life growing up in Tasmania and follows the highs and lows of his playing journey with New Norfolk, Glenorchy and Hawthorn, as told through the words of Hudson as well as his family, friends, teammates, coaches, opponents and others involved in his life.

Author Dan Eddy approached Hudson about writing the book, but Hudson admits he was unsure about the idea at first.

He was familiar with – and impressed by – other books Eddy had written including that of Essendon legend Dick Reynolds and former Hawthorn captain Peter Crimmins.

But mostly it was a decision inspired by the wishes of his extended family.

“I must say, my wife and my daughter were very keen for me to do it,’’ Hudson explains. “One reason is, I’ve got seven grandchildren and my daughter in particular was very keen that pen was put to paper so that the grandkids had an accurate record of not just what I did (in life and in football), but also my son Paul who followed in my footsteps. One of the proudest things in our family, which I talk about often, is the fact that Paul and I are in a pretty select group of fathers and sons who not only played football, but played for the same team and won a premiership.

Peter led the Hawks to victory in the 1971 grand final, while Paul did the same in 1991.

“So that’s very special,’’ Hudson says. “And that was pretty much the story behind it all. I never ever thought that I would have a book. I didn’t really think I’d ever do that. But when you boil it all down and consider the importance of family – and we are a very close family, the whole lot of us – it sort of puts it into a different perspective.’’

His grandchildren all have their own copy, and Hudson, who now lives in Melbourne, says putting the book together was a good chance to sit back and reflect on his life.

“It was quite surprising – there would be different things that I remembered and I’d just pick up the phone and talk to Dan,’’ Hudson recalls. “I’d be sitting at home on a Monday night and I’d think of something and I’d give him a ring. And then he had to put it together in some sort of order.’’

Hudson – or “Huddo” as he is affectionately known – says having other voices in the book, aside from his own, was essential.

“I’m really proud of what I achieved,’’ Hudson says of his career. “I’m particularly proud of the fact I was able to kick 150 goals in a season and I’m particularly proud that I’ve got the highest average of anyone who has ever played the game when it comes to goals per game, but I don’t sort of stand on the street corner and advertise it. I like to think of myself as reasonably humble in these things.’’

He says having a football great like John Kennedy – who coached Hudson at Hawthorn – refer to him as “a football genius’’ was an honour, although he’d never refer to himself that way.

Hudson has fond memories of his childhood in the Derwent Valley and says he couldn’t have asked for a better start to life.

“I’m rapt to have grown up in a place like New Norfolk, I often say I had the best backyard in the world,’’ he says. “The football oval was over my back fence, there was a tennis court down the road … I had the best of everything. That in itself was a bit different, I had the facilities there and the ground and all that stuff. If I felt like having a kick all I needed was a football and someone down the other end to kick it back to me.

“And just the fact that I could sit on our back fence and watch New Norfolk play footy, I didn’t even have to pay to get in to the ground. It was just there all the time, I just grew up with it.

“As far as I can remember, I had a footy in my hand most of the time. As a youngster I enjoyed my cricket too, and a bit of tennis. But there were only 24 hours in a day and seven days in week.’’

Hudson idolised Essendon legend John Coleman and spent many occasions running around on Boyer Oval imitating his favourite Aussie rules star.

“You could argue that he’s the greatest of all-time, I used to pretend to be John Coleman,’’ Hudson says.

He also had another idol, much closer to home.

“My dad (Robert “Bob” Hudson) played football, he played for New Norfolk, but he also coached a number of teams around the New Norfolk area, back when there were teams at Molesworth, Lachlan and Upper Derwent.”

In 1961, at just 15 years of age, Hudson was playing senior football, and got the opportunity to play alongside his dad, who was then playing for Upper Derwent.

‘’When I was 15 I played with him in the team and we won the premiership,’’ he recalls. “I feel very fortunate that I got to play football with my dad. My dad lived to 93 and my mum lived to 93. And as each year went by, the fact I was able to play football with my dad, I was able to think more and more about it. And I reckon every year it meant more and more to me.’’

Hudson later played for New Norfolk but by the time he was 21 he was heading to Melbourne, to play for Hawthorn, although he was a bit sad to leave his beloved home.

“I think New Norfolk is a beautiful town,’’ he says. “Add it all up and it was a pretty good place to grow up.’’

But the interstate move definitely proved worthwhile, with the full-forward quickly capturing the attention of football fans and fellow players. And it was not just his prolific goal kicking that left everyone gobsmacked, but also his unusual – and freakishly accurate – kicking style.

Hudson used a flat punt, rather than the more common torpedo or drop punt, believing that his foot connected with more of the ball’s “sweet spot” and was therefore less likely to go astray.

On his approach to goal, Hudson would hunch over the ball and guide it from hand to foot from close range to limit the risk of interference, with a friend once joking that Hudson’s style looked like “a dog trying to make love to a cricket ball’’.

“Hudson was unique,’’ author Dan Eddy writes. “He wasn’t an aerialist like Coleman or Pratt, a lead-and-mark forward like Peter McKenna, or a bustling and long-kicking player like Gordon Coventry and Doug Wade. He would intently focus on the ball throughout a game, even when it was passing through the crowd. Contemporaries noted that it seemed he could track the ball from the other end of the ground and be there when it dropped.

“From all angles, Hudson had the knack of bending his kick through the goals, much to the astonishment of opponents and spectators.’’

Hudson started playing for Hawthorn in 1967 and by 1971, after setting a string of goal-kicking records, there was such widespread intrigue and adulation for Hudson that the media coined the term “Hudsonitis”.

“Things were going pretty well for me, there’s no question about that,’’ Hudson admits. ‘’I kicked in excess of 100 goals each year and I was just getting a little bit better every year.’’

Hawthorn won the premiership in 1971 and in the same year Hudson equalled Bob Pratt’s 1934 record of 150 goals in a season.

The 1972 season – Hudson’s sixth VFL season – began like any other, with 25-year-old Hudson “feeling good” as round one got underway with a clash against Melbourne in front of 21,000 spectators at Glenferrie Oval on April Fool’s Day.

It was just before half time and Hudson had already kicked eight goals. He felt he was on track to break Fred Fanning’s longstanding 18-goal league record for a single game.

But disaster struck when Hudson hit the ground, tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.

“I’ve got to be honest, the record of 18 goals was in the back of my mind, I thought realistically it could be done,’’ Hudson says. “When I hit the ground and I knew I’d hurt my knee I froze all over. For one terrible moment I thought my football career had ended. A footballer’s greatest assets are his legs – as important to him as hands are to a pianist. To think that you’ve lost that asset is a sensation words cannot properly describe.’’

Many believed Hudson’s career was over, and Hudson admits he was unsure if he’d ever be able to play again.

He says there are still a lot of “what ifs’’ that plague him about that day, and Fanning’s record – set in 1947 – that he never got to break.

“I’d never felt more in control of a situation than I did that day and my ninth goal was going to be on the board [late] in the second quarter,” Hudson says in the book.

“That was the best chance I ever had to break Fred Fanning’s record. I’ve often said to people, if I’d done both knees at the end of that game I could’ve played it out, I would’ve settled for that. Because I reckon I was a chance to have a crack at that record.

“The only regret I’ve got in footy was that I couldn’t have played that game out,’’ Hudson adds. “I’d just come off a premiership the previous year. I thought ‘how good’s this?’. But by half time I was in the hospital across the road. Talk about chocolates to boiled lollies – it all happened so quickly.’’

Cruciate ligament surgery is commonplace these days, with a lot more known about how to repair and manage such an injury. But in the 1970s, Hudson says things were quite different.

“I’d seen so many of my colleagues and team mates who had done the same sort of injury and they couldn’t play again because they didn’t know how to fix it,’’ he says.

“I was one of the very first VFL players to have an operation to repair the cruciate ligament. To reconstruct it in those days they used to take a bit of bone and wedge [the torn ligament] back in. I did a cruciate. It was completely torn.”

Hudson’s wife Stephanie had recently given birth to the couple’s son, Paul (three years later they had a daughter, Perri) and with a family to support Hudson returned to Tasmanian and turned his attention to a career in the hotel industry, running the Granada Tavern at Berriedale for 15 years.

“That was my major motivation,’’ he says. “I thought ‘I may never play football again, what am I going to do to support my family?’.’’

Hudson returned to play a single game for the Hawks at VFL Park (Waverlley Park) in August 1973, making a grand entrance via helicopter and kicking eight goals against Collingwood. He played rounds 1 and 2 in 1974 but reinjured himself and returned to Tasmania

But surprisingly, it was during a social game of netball that Hudson agreed to play in with his hotel colleagues at the end of 1974, that paved the way for his major football comeback.

‘’In the netball game, the cartilage in my knee went completely,’’ Hudson explains. “Two days later I was back in Melbourne having cartilage removed from my knee.’’

And it was during his recovery from this surgery that he realised he would be able to play football again.

“It was a blessing in disguise,’’ he says of the netball match and the resulting injury. “Had I not done that, I would never have played football again.’’

By the middle of 1975 he was back on the footy field, coaching and playing for Glenorchy.

And then in 1977 he “did something that was pretty bold’’ and agreed to play for Hawthorn again, as a fly-in-fly-out player.

“I was doing something you could never do today,’’ says Hudson who kicked 110 goals for the Hawks in that comeback year. “I never trained with the team at all. I would fly out from Hobart to Melbourne on Friday afternoon – all games were in Melbourne in those days – I’d stay at the California Motel in Hawthorn, which became my second home, then go to the game on Saturday and then go straight out to the airport and be back home and back to running the hotel by 8.30pm that night.’’

“The fact I never trained with the team, people say ‘how could you do that?’. But that’s the way it was. I couldn’t do it any other way.’’

Hudson was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 1996 and elevated to “Legend” status in 1999. He’s also a Tasmania Football Hall of Fame inductee and a Sport Australia Hall of Fame inductee. And he’s being honoured this year on Hawthorn’s collectable Legends Guernsey.

For a man who thought he “may never play football again” after that fateful injury in 1972, Hudson admits it has been nice to see his career highlights come together in one book and ensure his family history didn’t “get lost in the ether’’.

Although, always humble, he’s careful not to make too much of a fuss. “A big positive out of the book, to me, is that it’s a record of my life, in particular my footy life,’’ he says. “Steph and I read it together. We got it as it was written, Dan would send parts of it to us and we’d read it. And we were both really happy with it the way it came up. It’s always hard when it’s about you. But when we got to the end, we both said we enjoyed reading it. So that’s probably as good as it gets.’’ •

A Football Genius: The Peter Hudson Story by Dan Eddy, published by Hardie Grant, is on sale now, RRP $34.99. A breakfast and book signing will be hosted by Glenorchy District Football Club on Saturday April 30 from 9am-11am with Peter Hudson and Dan Eddy in attendance. Tickets from $30 at trybooking.com/BYUDA