“But I’ve been looking for a ghost.”

Fred Hare, the pride of Omaha Tech and the Husker who flipped the shot over his head for an upset of Cazzie Russell and top-ranked Michigan, died on Oct. 2, 2014.

Fred Hare Jr. said his family didn’t learn of the death until Aug. 21, after an ex-wife of Hare’s was told by Social Security employees when she was signing up for retirement benefits.

Fred Hare Sr. was living with a caregiver in Krum, Texas, near Denton, when he died. He was 69.

Hare has been enshrined in the Nebraska High School Sports, Omaha Sports, Nebraska Black Sports, Tech High and Omaha Public Schools Athletic Halls of Fame. He was No. 80 in the updated Nebraska 100 list from 2015.

“Both his basketball career and his personal life were, and are, so very interesting, full of ups and downs, so many triumphs and so many tragedies,” said Nebraska native Cord Coslor, who had helped Hare with an autobiography that remains unpublished.

“In more recent years, he battled a lot of serious health issues, and was sadly separated from his family and friends.”

Hare was one of 18 siblings, including stillborn twins and triplets and others who met tragic fates. By 2000, he was the only one left. His father, a sharecropper, died when Fred was a baby. Fred worked in cotton fields with his family before they left Arkansas. His mother died at 47.

The first time his name was in The World-Herald was in 1955 for winning the 9-10 age division in the softball throw at the city youth track and field meet while attending Kellom Elementary. Three years later, as a Tech Junior High student, he scored 50 points in a city youth league game at Kellom. It was just the beginning.

He was a Rotary Club leadership honoree as an eighth-grader, then became the “find” of the season for coach Neal Mosser, as our Don Lee wrote. Hare made the Tech varsity as a freshman in the 1959-60 season. In his first game, he and Bill King each had three baskets in the final three minutes to defeat Omaha Creighton Prep.

In a bookend to his prep career, Hare’s Tech team of 1962-63 — considered here as the best in state history — won the school’s first state hoops title since 1926 by blasting Prep 91-73. He scored 31 points against the Junior Jays, who had handed Tech one of its two losses during the season. He scored a record 88 points in the tournament after netting 82 the year before, when Tech believed it was robbed of a state title in a 68-62 finals loss to Lincoln Northeast.

Hare averaged 26.4 points as a senior, setting the Class A career record of 1,583 points that stood until Omaha North’s Mike McGee broke it 14 years later. An interesting note is that the summer before McGee’s senior season, he and Hare played pickup games together at Adams Park.

Hare won four letters, was perhaps the first to play in four Class A state tournaments and was on the All-Nebraska team twice. He was the first World-Herald athlete of the year to play a single sport and also the first black athlete honored.

He was pursued by the likes of Kansas, Minnesota and Kansas State, where Tech grad Bob Boozer escorted him on his campus visit. But new Nebraska coach Joe Cipriano won out in recruiting.

His Husker years were turbulent. He was the leading scorer on the freshman team back in the days the NCAA prohibited freshmen from playing on the varsity. But he and Nate Branch considered leaving NU and rekindled transfer talk when they visited the Creighton campus.

Hare led NU in scoring and rebounding as a sophomore, although he was the sixth man the second half of the season. He scored a season-high 33 points in a loss to Texas.

It’s his shot against Michigan in a 74-73 win that lives as his signature moment in Lincoln. As our Bob Williams wrote of that basket from Dec. 12, 1964:

Facing away from the basket and about five feet from the hoop, he flipped the ball backward over his head on a blind shot for the winning points with one second on the clock.

“How does it feel now to be a Husker?” Hare was asked in the locker room.

“Wonderful — and it always has.”

Hare had gotten the ball back after first missing from 20 feet. NU center Bob Antulov’s putback try was deflected to Hare, whose flip completed a team-high 20-point game.

Hare was NU’s sixth man for much of his junior season, when Stu Lantz started at guard with Omaha Benson’s Grant Simmons. Both went on to pro careers. Hare’s production dropped in part because he missed five games with an injured right knee that required offseason surgery. Another operation, in October 1966, forced him to sit out the 1966-67 season.

He won a starting job in his comeback season. But two days before Christmas 1967, and a month after the senior buried his mother, Hare showered and walked out of the locker room at halftime of a loss in the NU Coliseum to Wyoming. He went to the bench as NU trailed 7-0 and didn’t get back in.

“I didn’t do anything drastic,” Cipriano said, “other than visit with him about his mistakes.”

The coach held Hare out of the Big Eight’s Christmas tournament in Kansas City, and Hare left the team before regular-season conference play began in January.

When he tried out with the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, an expansion team, in the summer of 1968, he told the Arizona Republic, “I never had the opportunity in college to show what I could do.”

After a tryout with the Los Angeles Lakers, he traveled with the Harlem Clowns. Then he went back to college in Mexico. He played three seasons for the University of Americas team in the Mexican Inter-Collegiate Basketball League, averaging 35 points a game his first season and becoming its captain his final two seasons.

Contrary to previous reporting, a life-threatening head-on car crash on a Denver interstate was not why he missed a rookie camp tryout with the Kansas City-Omaha Kings in 1972 — the late Charlie Mancuso, who managed the Civic Auditorium, had gotten him invited. In a letter of apology to Mancuso cited in The World-Herald, Hare said he had been moving from Minneapolis to Denver and the invitation caught up to him too late.

Whenever the accident happened — an elderly driver supposedly was driving in the wrong direction — Hare spent months in the hospital before returning to Omaha. By 2000, he was in Texas, remarried and helping a son with a roofing business.

Coslor, who’s from Minden, Nebraska, and lives in Florida, said he met Hare in the early 1990s.

“Over the years, he lived a pretty nomadic life, in which I’d lose contact with him from time to time, but he always seemed to eventually reach out to update me on his whereabouts,” Coslor wrote on a blog post he shared with me. “During that time, I was able to interview him about his life and career extensively, developed and ran his personal website, and even began writing his autobiography with him.

“The projects always seemed to come to a halt for one reason or another, but the friendship never did. He loved talking about the past, which I also greatly enjoyed, and he continued to send me his ‘writings’ sporadically in hopes he could one day get his book done ... and maybe one day, with the help of his kids he loved so much, I’ll be able to finish what he started.”

Coslor said he lost contact with Hare about five years ago, just as Fred Jr. had. It’s possible the two of them might finish the Hare story.

“I have a few chapters, at least, in Fred’s original writings,” Coslor said. “This makes me so sad to know that no one knew about Fred’s passing for so long.”

It especially hurts Fred Jr., who found out only when a half-brother contacted him.

“He raised me by himself,” said the younger Hare, who is living in Dallas. “I wanted to tell him how sorry I was” for things done in his youth.

“I wanted to see him again.”

Contact the writer: stu.pospisil@owh.com, 402-444-1041, twitter.com/stuOWH