Hicks Cleared to Make Return for the Bruins : College football: Leading rusher for ’93 team was thought to be sidelined for season after suffering knee injury last spring.

He’s 19, and like many a teen-ager he hears what he wants to hear. Nobody is telling him he can’t play , only that he shouldn’t. Which to Skip Hicks means he should.

Hang conventional wisdom. Hang medical textbooks. Six months after surgery to reconstruct his left knee, he’s set upon running the football against Washington on Saturday at Seattle.

He was released to full duty Monday by Gerald Finerman, UCLA’s team physician, who had talked with the family. Everybody wants Hicks to sit out this season.

Everybody but Hicks.

“If I didn’t feel I could do it, I wouldn’t even try,” the running back said. “Since everything is good, I want to give it a try. I really don’t know how it will work out. I know it seems like it’s doing really good. I want to prove it to myself.”

His dad doesn’t want to watch.

“I told him I probably wouldn’t even look at it,” Charles Hicks said. “I don’t know if I could handle it. When he got hurt (a sprained ankle last season) in that Nebraska game, gosh, my wife looked at me and said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I said, ‘You don’t understand, do you? I know just how he feels because I’ve been through it.’ ”

Charles Hicks set rushing records at Southwestern Oklahoma, then got a free-agent tryout with the Green Bay Packers that was cut short because he suffered a broken leg.

After a week with Winnipeg in the Canadian Football League, he suffered a broken shoulder. Another NFL try, that with the Houston Oilers, ended with another broken leg.

He has spent 21 years coaching high school football. Teen-agers are nothing new to him. His son is something else, though.

They have known this was coming since a rainy March 19, when Skip slipped on a wet long-jumping board in a track meet in Drake Stadium, then landed awkwardly in the damp pit. They simply didn’t realize it would be so soon.

The knee was a total blow-out, and surgery was followed by the first stages of rehabilitation. Rather than keep him at UCLA for the summer, medical personnel put together a program for a sports rehabilitation center near Hicks’ home in Wichita Falls, Tex.

The coaching staff wrote him off, revamping the offense to put emphasis on the passing game, figuring their leading rusher from 1993, with 563 yards as a freshman, was sidelined for the season.

Back home in north Texas, Hicks lifted weights during the summer. He ran on the grass and the track at Wichita Falls High and on the hills in Bridwell Park. He grunted and sweated when Steve Bailey, the center’s physical trainer, pushed and pulled on the leg, seeking to restore its range of motion.

And that was the official program.

Unofficially, he was up at 5 a.m., running an hour before his father awakened. Weekends were spent playing pickup basketball at Midwestern University. Charles Hicks didn’t find that out until a couple of weeks ago, after Skip had returned to UCLA.

“I told him I didn’t want him playing basketball,” Charles said. “He was still limping. They said they knocked him around pretty good, and one of his closest friends said he told them, ‘If I want to get my leg back to normal, I’m going to have to forget about it and play like I always play.’ ”

William Breland, the rehabilitation center owner, was horrified when he found out about the basketball.

“His injury was as bad as it could be,” Breland said. “You don’t get a worse injury when you’re a football player, but as it turned out, he actually improved almost too quickly for his own good. I know it was a bit frustrating during the summer because to some degree we had to temper things a bit. No matter how well you are going, you have to spend some time for the internal things to occur.”

Have they occurred?

It’s the question that dogs Coach Terry Donahue, Charles Hicks and everybody else involved in the case, including a medical staff that has put Skip Hicks through tests that seemed more like hurdles to determine if his left leg had healed. He has passed them all.

“There’s no question that he’s 100%,” Donahue said. “How can you tell somebody who’s healthy that he can’t play?”

It’s not as if he didn’t try.

“I’m not speaking out of school,” Donahue said. “Skip knows exactly how I feel about it. I’ve strongly encouraged him not to play. I haven’t told him that I’m going to hold him out. I don’t think I should do that as a coach.”

But he wouldn’t mind if somebody else did it.

“I asked Skip the other night, because Donahue had asked me, if I told him not to play, would he play?” Charles Hicks said. “I told him I don’t know. I would hate to tell him that because we’ve never been cross in his 19 years. . . . So I asked him the other night, ‘Son, if I asked you not to play, would you play?’ He said, ‘No, Dad, I wouldn’t, because you’ve always known best for me.’ Then he said, ‘I hope you don’t ask me, though.’ I told him, ‘I’m not going to ask you then.’ ”

Said Skip: “My dad, he’s kind of afraid. But I’m at the age to make my own decisions. I know he would prefer for me to sit out. He said he will hold his breath every time I carry the ball.”

So will Donahue, who said Monday that Hicks would be worked back into the lineup quickly, sharing time with Sharmon Shah, who is third in the Pacific 10 Conference in rushing with 453 yards.

Hicks is not lacking in confidence. Said Charles Hicks: “He said, ‘I was watching Nebraska and their defense wasn’t near as good as it was last year. I could have run all over them.’ ”

A season ago, Skip rushed for 148 yards against Nebraska in a 14-13 UCLA defeat. This season he stood on the sideline, watching his teammates get beat, 49-21.

“I feel like I’m in better shape this year,” Hicks said.

It remains to be seen. Or not seen, in the case of his father, who is plainly nervous.

“I told my wife I don’t know what I would do if he were to get out there and re-injure himself and I could have had something to do with not letting him play,” Charles Hicks said.

Donahue will be closer than a Wichita Falls, Tex., living room. He will hold his breath every time Hicks carries.

“But you know what?” he said. “There is some truth in that I would be doing the same thing if he waited until next season.”