good article on Fredette, from Sports Ilustrated’s Kelly Anderson: “A Real Jimmer Dandy”

Some highlights:

“Honestly, I feel more comfortable on the road. I take the heckling as a compliment.” And the sudden hush that falls over a crowd when he hits a big three? “That’s my favorite sound.” – Jimmer Fredette

“Jimmer excelled at other sports—at 12 he could crush a baseball 350 feet, and as a junior at Glens Falls High he was an all-state receiver—but practicing those sports bored him. Practicing basketball was fun.”

And here’s an excerpt about Fredette’s brother, T.J., and his health troubles:

TJ once had dreams of his own basketball stardom. But unlike Jimmer, he couldn’t focus—on athletics or in school. From the time he was 11 he suffered debilitating panic attacks, terrifying him and his parents and often landing him in the hospital. “It was a claustrophobic feeling, like having a heart attack,” he says.

By the time he finished his playing career, at Adirondack Community College in Queensbury, N.Y., in 2002, TJ had learned to cope with his condition. Then when he was 24, he suffered another neurological blow. In the summer of 2006 he had surgery for a torn left ACL. The knee healed, but the headaches, dizziness, dropping blood pressure, blurry vision and balance problems that plagued him immediately after the surgery didn’t go away. “I’d sit on the couch and feel like I was falling,” he says.

After Jimmer left for his freshman year at Provo, TJ’s condition got worse. He and his parents eventually found a neurologist who diagnosed damage to TJ’s vestibular system—which governs balance and spatial orientation—perhaps related to the anesthesia for the ACL surgery. He learned exercises to help rehab the damage, but things got worse before they got better. TJ spent the better part of a year on his parents’ couch, so sick and depressed that “I feared he would do something crazy to end the agony,” Kay wrote in an e-mail.

There was one light in the darkness: Jimmer. “The only thing that kept me going was his games; they were everything to me,” says TJ. Says Kay, “I don’t know what would have happened if TJ didn’t have that to hold on to. Jimmer was saving TJ’s life, and he didn’t even realize it.”