Utah Utes football: Close call — After brush with death, Kruger happy to be back in pads

Paul Kruger didn't understand what was bothering him, but something seemed wrong. As he left a party on the night of Jan. 19, he was filled with a sense of dread. He would recall this several times to his mother after it was all over and he was in a hospital stabbed and bleeding.

Kruger had just finished his freshman season of football at the University of Utah. A converted quarterback, he won a starting position at defensive end months after returning from a two-year LDS Church mission in Missouri. On this night last January, he and the rest of his party — his brother David and sister Jessica, his best friend Ryder Olsen, teammate Greg Newman, and two other friends, Jason Burg and Meredith Mangum — were en route to the Park City Film Festival. Along the way, they stopped at a Salt Lake party to say hello to friends. They stayed only 15 minutes, and while leaving the house Kruger had that ominous feeling come over him.

"Some people call it intuition, I guess," says Kruger. "It was just an uneasy feeling."

Moments later, three carloads of young men — most of them estimated to be in their 20s — drove by shouting obscenities. Suddenly, Kruger understood his feeling of dread.

"I didn't know what to think about the way I had felt, but when the cars pulled up I knew what was going on," he says.

Angry words were returned. Newman threw a snowball. Newman and David ran ahead to where one of the cars had stopped. There was a confrontation. Two other cars pulled up and more men joined the scrum.

Within moments, they realized the hoodlums had knives and were eager to use them. That was terrifying enough even without knowing this — Kruger has just one kidney and no spleen.

Almost everywhere he goes, the request is the same. People want Kruger to show them his scars. He patiently complies, lifting his shirt to reveal a maze of zippered red lines. There's a small slice in the middle, where the knife entered, and another 3-inch gash on the side, where the knife entered again and sliced downward, but it's obscured by the long surgical slices that surgeons made — side to front and down the center of his abdomen.

Kruger bared his scars for newspaper photographers last weekend at spring football practice. Remarkably, some eight weeks after the attack, he began football drills. For the most part, he participates on a limited basis — no tackling, light contact — but he did manage a few plays in a scrimmage at the end of Saturday's practice.