The Ghost of Fred Hare

   "You know, I believe we have two lives.
     The life we learn with... and the life we live after that"
          -Iris Gaines,from the movie The Natural


By Harry Cummins

     It has been over 60 years since they played the greatest basketball game I ever saw.  A persisting ghost from that game still lives in my attic, loosely pressed between the pages of a variegated and wrinkled game program.

     However, this story is not about that snowy December night in 1964 when Nebraska sophomore guard Fred Hare blindly flipped the ball backwards over his head as the buzzer sounded, giving the Huskers a 74-73 upset win over No 1 ranked Michigan and their near-mythical All-American Player of the Year, Cazzie Russell.

     No, this story is about the rest of Fred Hare's life that ended on October 2, 2014, at the age of 69. His final years were spent in the isolation of a small north-central Texas town, confined to an electric wheelchair and separated from family and friends. News of his passing failed to reach his own family for almost a year.

     Since that celebrated winter's night in Nebraska basketball lore, this much has been pieced together from the turbulent and nomadic years that shadowed Fred Hare as tightly as any lock step defender:


      Two days before Christmas 1967, early into his final year at Nebraska, Hare quickly showered at halftime of a Big 8 game against Wyoming and walked out of the locker room, never to return. The exact circumstances remain clouded.

     After a tryout with the Los Angeles Lakers, he traveled extensively with the Harlem Clowns and Harlem Globetrotters.  He also played briefly in Canada.

     His mother died in 1967 at the age of 47. After the funeral, Hare sold all his belongings and boarded a plane for Mexico, where he played three seasons for the University of Americas, averaging 35 points a game.

     In 1972, Hare survived a life-threatening head-on crash on a Colorado interstate, spending months recovering in a local hospital.

     Fred Hare came from a large family of 18 brothers and sisters, including stillborn twins and triplets. Many of his siblings met tragic ends and by 2000, Hare was the only one left, living with his second wife and helping a son with a roofing business.  His own father, a sharecropper,had passed away when Fred was just an infant.

     Hare had open heart surgery somewhere around 2008, having already suffered two heart attacks in Mexico in earlier years.  Two of his sons were born in Mexico.

     His final years were spent in the company of a live-in caretaker in Krum,Texas  Hare died as an enshrined member of the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame and the Nebraska Black Sports Hall of Fame. Those who saw him play say he was  perhaps the best player to ever come out of the state.  They said he was a natural.

     In a span of a week, toward the end of his senior year at Omaha Tech, Hare was voted 'Prom King' by his fellow students, most of them white.   A few days later, Parade Magazine named him one of top 15 high school basketball players in America, a list that included a 7 foot sophomore  Lew Alcindor, later to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the all-time leading scorer in NBA history.

     Hare spent many years attempting to write a book about his roller-coaster life.  Trying to chronicle his journey was "For the Lord, and part of a promise to my mother that I'd finish college" Hare said in a 2011 interview. He took writing classes to finish his college credits.  The book was finally finished by his son, Freddie Lee Hare, Jr.



     I never knew Fred Hare, although I met him once in the men's department of Gold's Department Store in Lincoln, Nebraska, days after his unforgettable no-look shot had reverberated across the sports pages of America.  "Thanks for the memory" I said, and shook his hand. At the time, we both were shopping for warmer clothing to shield us from the cold landscape that lay ahead.

     We were also both students then, learning all we could about the tumultuous world as we knew it in 1964.

     To this day, I remain haunted by the ghost roaming my attic.  Haunted still by the shadowy significance of every human life.

 

   

   

   

 
       



   

Above The Rim

John Rudometkin- 1940-2015  (Pictured here in 1962 game vs Jerry Lucas and Ohio State)

By Harry Cummins

     After all, it is one thing to play the game of basketball and another thing, entirely, to manage the vagaries of a fully measured life.

     I had yet to grapple with such inherent complexity in 1970, that same year I first met John Rudometkin.

      I was a young sports-focused journalist on assignment from an East Coast magazine and had arrived in the early morning hours at Rudometkin's Fresno, California home to profile the nearly forgotten former All-American.

     My interview request had been precipitated by a succession of unaccountable events that had baffled medical science.  Following an arduous struggle, Rudometkin had just beaten a rare and inoperable cancer.  The doctors who recognized a terminal cancer case when they saw one, had once advised family members that the end was near.  These same doctors were now running tests on his blood to determine if he might have certain anti-bodies in his system that could be used to cure others.

      I sensed I was about to meet-up with a miracle.

     Later that 1970 morning, I remember the 6'6" Rudometkin, totally cancer free, emerge from the tool shed in back of his house, a timeworn basketball firmly in his grasp. The adulation of the crowd was long gone then.  So, too, were the acrobatic moves that once prompted famed Los Angeles Lakers radio announcer Chick Hearn to dub him "Rudo the Reckless Russian." Those same moves that prompted the New York Knicks to select John as the 9th overall pick in the 1962 NBA draft.

     A salvo of shots soon began to arch their way through the net and bounce crazily off the dirt surface.

     "I guess you never lose that touch," he laughed.

      Until the sad day many decades later, (2015) when he passed away of chronic lung disease at the age of 75, John Rudometkin never lost his touch.


     He never lost a human touch bestowed on the wife and 3 sons he left behind.  Never lost that touch embraced by his basketball family who still celebrate Rudometkin as one of the greatest players in University of Southern California history.  Never lost that touch that memorialized the courts of Santa Maria High School and Allan Hancock College in central California.

      Rudometkin's number 44 still hangs in the USC rafters, his name enshrined in the cardinal and gold Hall of Fame. His luminescent statistics seem irrelevant to this story.  His collegiate coach, Forrest Twogood, flatly called Rudometkin "the greatest player I ever coached."  In 1962, he joined an illustrious AP College All-American team which featured future NBA greats John Havlicek, Jerry Lucas and Dave DeBusschere.

     Rudometkin also never lost that touch for others, traveling across the country as a ministering associate evangelist for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It was a different kind of glory than he once experienced from those celebrated years at USC, and those abbreviated stints in the NBA.  The crowds were quieter, save a hearty amen now and then.

      His time in the NBA beset by chronic fatigue and his yet undiagnosed physical condition, John Rudometkin failed to enjoy predicted success as a professional basketball player.  He was eventually released by the San Francisco Warriors, whose front line at the time included the likes of Wilt Chamberlain and Nate Thurmond.  After just two and a half frustrating seasons in the NBA, unbeknownst to John, a tumor surrounding his heart and lungs was expanding rapidly.

     Why, he wondered, had it suddenly required unnatural effort to run up and down the court?  Where was the burning desire to push himself beyond his capacity, the trademark of his earlier style of play? Soon after his release from the Warriors, Rudometkin found himself paralyzed in a hospital bed, close to death. It was a siege that lasted seven months, sending him into convulsions.

    What he ultimately gleaned while dangling on death's abyss, John explained to me in this later conversation:  "It was at that time that an inexplainable certainty came over me. It was a much bigger game, a different set of rules, but I couldn't ever give up. My trust in God had, above all, become very real to me."  Rudometkin's ultimate triumph over cancer seemed a direct result of his faith in God and a bevy of experimental drugs that nearly killed him.

     Sometimes life presents a window which we can see through... to the underlying coherency in this world. The player that USC teammate Chris Appel once described as having"the same court creativity as Kobe Bryant," had been given an extended, albeit painful, time to stare thru such an opening.

     Many years after our interview, I received another letter from John describing how a fire had erupted in his home on Halloween eve.  His wife and boys narrowly escaped injury.  The house, however, was totally destroyed.  All of Rudometkin's trophies, awards, and keepsakes were lost.

     "You know", he wrote, "I realized then that those things no longer meant that much to me. God had replaced that part of my life with something far greater."

     Fighting thru a lifetime of health anxieties and the aftermath of cancer treatments, much of John Rudometkin's final years were accompanied by an oxygen tank to help him breathe.  I never knew the degree of his daily suffering.

     Recently, I happened to chance upon the old Walt Disney movie classic, 'The Absent-Minded Professor' which tells the zany tale of a professor/scientist who rigs a basketball game by ironing a miraculous substance onto the soles of the home team's shoes.  Once those players take to the court, they bound high over their taller opponents, high above the rim.

     In what remains a stroke of perfect casting, John Rudometkin was selected as one of those real-life basketball players used in the making of that film.  Today, the memory of John's honorable life motivates my own life to ascend in search of higher ground.

     John called me one afternoon a few years before his death.  He would always begin our conversations with "How's my brave buddy"?

     In reality, he was the brave one.  His example, his touch for life, was a towering influence in helping me understand the exalted lessons and miracles that reside above the rim...above our natural impulses.

     Yes, it's another thing, entirely, to live a life.    I understand now.

In  Memoriam

hcummins@aol.com

This story is also dedicated to every player, coach, and administrator at every level of basketball. Those who pursue their chosen sport with passion and who also aspire to make a significant difference in the lives of others.

As they say at John's alma mater... FIGHT ON!!!

   

   

   

 

   

   

   

     

The Magical Quest of Coach Quinn Curry

                                                           

                      

By Harry Cummins

     From his commanding position these days at the end of the Multnomah Lions bench, 26-year-old Associate Head Coach Quinn Curry has found a front row seat on the shimmering edges of a dream.

     Basketball has always been the catalyst to Curry's twisting odyssey, transporting him from the hardscrabble streets of west Chicago to a master's degree in management and leadership from Multnomah University in Portland, Oregon.

     Once Curry's own playing career at Multnomah concluded, which he modestly characterizes as "being a good teammate," his observable talent in skill development and statistical analysis landed him a job as assistant coach under then head coach Curt Bickley, who had earlier recruited him as a 5'9"guard.

     When newly appointed coach Tayo Gem took control of the Lions last season, Curry was soon elevated to the title of Associate Head Coach. "After just a few conversations with Quinn, I quickly realized that this guy had the vibe of a future coach as he knew so much more about the game of basketball than just being an operations guy," says Gem, himself a former NCAA D-2 player and fellow Masters scholar. 

     Together, Gem and Curry have quietly coerced this malleable edition of the once mediocre Lions to a robust 10-3 start to the 2024-25 season and a coveted spot in the upper regions of the NAIA's rugged Cascade Collegiate Conference. It has also catapulted Curry closer to his own holy grail, the discovery of basketball "magic."  

     "You always hear stories about those special teams from way back that were able to bring together a diverse group of undervalued players that were able to create magic because of how connected they were," says Curry. "This is my passion, to try to get as close to making magic as possible."

    Such transcendent destinations are not easily reached, concedes Curry, but can often be aided thru tried- and- true measurements.  "There first needs to be an honest attitude about what needs to be improved," says Curry.  

    "Statistics often tell a coach where a player could improve. A different way to drive home this lesson while also creating connectively is to show a player how he can improve individually in specific categories that will most benefit the team" 

     Curry claims Multnomah seeks first to enlist the person rather than the player in their recruiting efforts. "I think listening to them talk about the game is huge. What a person loves about the game is important to me," says Curry.

     "Do they play for status or to be cool? Or do they love being a part of a team? What is it that draws them into the game itself?"

     Married to his wife Lydia last year, they share a home with two cats, Tallulah and Ezra. Quinn Curry has long maintained a fidelity to this Bible based Oregon school thru a series of changes in its leadership, the latest when Multnomah was purchased last year by Jessup University in California.

    "I am grateful to Multnomah, and especially to Curt and Tayo, for giving me the opportunity to pursue my passion of coaching, relates Quinn.

     Selflessness, professes Curry, is a huge part of living a satisfying life. 

      "What, then, is more rewarding than giving yourself to a group and perhaps seeing that group pull off something truly unforgettable."

   

  Spoken like a true magician.

Postscript- Within weeks following the publication of this story, Multnomah University announced the end of undergraduate studies and NAIA athletics at the Oregon school. At the close of this unforgettable season, coach Curry will look elsewhere to pursue his passion.  (FINAL UPDATE) Multnomah finished their final season ever with a school record 17 wins, including their first ever win in the post season. They also came within an eyelash of upsetting the nation's number 1 team, loosing 89-88 to the College of Idaho.

        

     

     

     

     

                                    

Remembering The Death Of A Dear Friend

 

The Sunshine Boys, Spring Training 1989 - Robert Brustad (right) along with this author
and the late Commissioner of Major League Baseball, A. Bartlett Giamatti

By Harry Cummins

     A few years ago I lost a close friend to metastatic cancer.

     Dr. Robert Brustad, age 69, left behind a wife,Vone, and a teenage son "JJ".  Not incidentally, Bob also left behind the game of baseball.

     Baseball ultimately couldn't save my friend from an end that awaits us all, but it became a comforting companion to his well-spent life and especially to his final agonizing year of chemotherapy. Our final conversations would always leave space at the end for the saving grace and hopeful expectancy of another baseball season, another season in the sun to share. We both knew we were talking about far more than a game.

     Baseball may not be a road to God, but it can become a clear pathway to a deeply shared, collective love between persons.  One of the things that lets us know we are never traveling alone. 

     This, then, is the supreme message my friend's life left behind. The sacrificial hit that transcends seasons and sends us all "home."

     Love one another!

hcummins@aol.com

     

     

Happy Mother's Day To All!

 

An Adolescent's Affecting Story Recalled

 

"When I think about it now, it wasn't too bad, after all.

Worst things happened in 1958. In actual fact, I am a specialist when it comes to feeling compassion. I still can't forget that terrible story about Laika, the poor Eskimo dog in Sputnik 2, who was so brave while there was still some food left inside the rocket.

But what happened after that? Did she starve to death?

Just think of that!!

From My Life As A Dog

Remembering the Distinctive Voice of Paul Auster

 

From New York Trilogy-1985

"Every life is inexplicable, I keep telling myself.

No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling.

To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge .... none of that tells us very much."

Paul Auster [1947-2024]