On the day she found out Erwin Dudley had been named Southeastern Conference Player of the Year, Alabama associate media relations director Becky Hopf located the big man in the Crimson Tide training room to tell him the news.

The 6-foot-8, 260-pound Dudley's reaction to learning he'd beaten out Tayshaun Prince, Vincent Yarbrough, Marcus Haislip, Brett Nelson, Udonis Haslem, Jarvis Hayes and teammate Rod Grizzard -- all bigger names in his own conference? He laid a headlock on trainer John Morr with his left hand and went back to eating a hamburger with his right.

That's Erwin Dudley. A self-effacing (though not shy) double-double guy on the court and off.

On it, he'll get you double-figure points and rebounds every night out.

	Erwin Dudley didn't go looking for attention, but his overall game demanded it last season.

Off it, he's always a threat to put away the double cheeseburger or put someone in a double sleeper hold. Sometimes simultaneously.

When you're not hearing how valuable Dudley is to the defending SEC regular-season champions, you're hearing how much he eats or how much he enjoys wrestling around with teammates and anyone else within arm's reach.

"He piles it pretty high," coach Mark Gottfried said. "About four levels."

Gottfried was referring to Dudley's plate at training table, but he might as well have been talking about his points and rebounds. Last time the state of Alabama saw a small-town, wide-bodied horse like this, his name was Charles Barkley.

That's not to say Dudley will become anywhere near the player Sir Charles became, but he's putting together a pretty stout college career. A guy who arrived in Tuscaloosa as a relative unknown from tiny Uniontown, Ala., could leave as one of the bigger names (and appetites) in 'Bama basketball history.

Dudley already has started all 100 games Alabama has played since he arrived in 1999. He's played more than 3,000 minutes, scored 1,348 points and pulled down 908 rebounds. He is, in the words of point guard Mo Williams, "a beast."

"I'm just being aggressive, not giving into anything," Dudley said of his on-court demeanor. "When it's time to go, you go. Getting loose balls, taking rebounds from other people."

If Dudley replicates last year's game averages (15.2 points and 8.9 rebounds) he'll easily wind up in the top five in school history in both categories. With good health he's a lock to set the school record for most career starts.

And remember, this is Erwin Dudley we're talking about. Not Grizzard, not Gerald Wallace, not Schea Cotton or the other prep All-Americans Gottfried chased in his ambitious recruiting campaigns of recent years. The no-frills, dependable player from a hometown of 2,500. The quality citizen with the 3.0 grade-point average in Criminal Justice, who called Gottfried's wife, Elizabeth, last May to wish her happy Mother's Day.

Yeah, that guy. Against fairly considerable odds, he has become the foundation of Gottfried's impressive building campaign at Alabama.

"He's so consistently solid every day," Gottfried said. "Off the floor, on the floor, he's there every day. He plays every day in every drill. Over the course of a practice or a game there may be someone who does more flashy things, but you've got your hands full with him for 40 minutes."

He has constructed a remarkable body of work for a guy who lacks the spectacular athleticism of so many marquee players in the SEC, and who came to Alabama as an understudy.

Dudley was an AAU teammate of Rod Grizzard's and Marvin Stone's with the fairly infamous Alabama Lasers, a team that became one of Nike's pets because of Stone's prodigious potential. Coming out of high school, the 6-10 Stone was the McDonald's All-American and Grizzard was a fourth-team Parade All-American.

	“	Before the season, I was nowhere mentioned in the category of SEC Player of the Year. If you would have told people I'd be player of the year, they would've laughed. ”
		— Erwin Dudley, Alabama senior forward

Dudley, a prep rebounding phenomenon, was nothing more than all-state. Which might have helped in the long run.

Today, Stone (who was rabidly recruited by Alabama) is starting over at Louisville after a failed three years at Kentucky. Grizzard went pro last year and is now trying to recover from the mistake, having dropped into the second round of the draft (land of unguaranteed contracts) and already having been cut once.

Dudley? He's the third wheel now enjoying the spoils the other big names missed out on.

"I didn't worry about it," Dudley said. "They were getting most of the attention, but I'm not selfish. While people were looking at them, I just had to go out and play."

Dudley played well enough to get a scholarship to the school approximately 45 minutes north of Uniontown. He arrived as a country-strong, 218-pounder who has since gotten stronger, building himself into the SEC's most immovable low-post object.

"He's done a great job working on his body, to get done what he couldn't get done earlier in his career," Gottfried said.

But even heading into last season, Dudley was less celebrated on his own team than Grizzard or even Williams, a freshman hotshot recruit. Then, as Alabama inexorably established itself as the class of the SEC, a startling fact became clear:

Nobody else was consistently putting up the numbers of the kid from small-town Alabama. And nobody else's team was winning as much.

Next thing you know, Dudley is enjoying a headlock, a hamburger and something rare in his basketball career: hype.

"Before the season, I was nowhere mentioned in the category of SEC Player of the Year," Dudley said. "If you would have told people I'd be player of the year, they would've laughed."

The last laugh -- the winner's laugh -- belonged to Dudley. Now comes the motivation to have all the laughs this year, too. Even in winning 27 games last year, Alabama still was upset in the SEC tournament final by Mississippi State and then was knocked out of the NCAA Tournament in the second round by Kent State -- running the school's streak of years without a Sweet Sixteen appearance to 11.

"We want to go out there and prove ourselves in case there's anybody who maybe thought we were a fluke or something," Dudley said. "We want to prove we're just as good as we were last year, and we've worked to make ourselves better."

Pat Forde of the Louisville Courier-Journal is a regular contributor to ESPN.com