QUEENSBURY
Night would envelop the church, seeping into the halls, the rooms, until T.J., the older brother, switched on a lamp.
Keep your eyes on the light; keep your mind on the basketball.
Dribble toward the light.
The boy in the black hallway, he's not even an outline in the darkness, he's nothing but the sound of ball against floor.
T.J. would wait by the lamp, in the light, encouraging, coaching, always there -- always there.
A thousand nights T.J. and Jimmer Fredette spent dribbling, practicing inside The Church of Latter Day Saints in Queensbury.
Jimmer's story is familiar in Glens Falls: The star basketball player whose team came within a handful of points of winning a state championship, now forging the next step of his dream across the country in Utah at Division I Brigham Young University.
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T.J.'s story isn't familiar. And life, for T.J. Fredette, has never been easy, but these things make it easier: faith, basketball and a talent for music that's packed South Street clubs and garnered interest from a major record label.
T.J.'s father, Al, was raised a Baptist, but converted to the Church of Latter Day Saints - the lead church of Mormon faith - the day before he turned 18. Al's older brother converted after meeting a young Mormon woman, his future wife, while serving in Germany. Al said the change in his brother was too great to ignore.
T.J.'s mother, Kay, a Catholic, never converted.
"Nothing was ever forced on us," T.J. said. "We could stay at home with Mom or we could go to church."
Al said: "You just have patience and know he'll make up his own mind."
Basketball, too, is in T.J.'s blood. Kay's brothers played, Al plays, so it's only fitting that after a game at school, in the third grade, T.J. came home a hoops' junkie.
"After that day," Al remembered, "he had the bug."
T.J. started rapping his senior year of high school, while starring on a Glens Falls team that nearly won a sectional title.
"I would hear him and his friends in the basement and they'd be rapping," Al said. "They'd come up and say 'Mr. Fredette, you should go down and listen to T.J., he's really good.' He said, 'Dad, I really like this.' I told him, 'As long as you keep the standards that we're not going to have off-color in our house.' That was difficult in the beginning, because everything you listened to in the rap world was different than what T.J. was doing."
Bill Haskell, T.J.'s basketball coach for two seasons at Adirondack Community College said: "I gave him a nickname, 'The Mormon Rapper.' "
This is T.J. now: A charming, handsome man in his mid-20s, a promising musician who nearly scored a record deal with Rap-A-Lot Records, a prominent hip-hop label. He plays hoops in night leagues. He works shifts at his friend's pizza joint, Angelina's, and watches his baby brother play in person, when he can, and on television, when he can't.
T.J. can't sit still. He's always tapping his heel or wringing his hands. He always seems to be peering around you as if he's worried he left on his car lights.
There's an explanation.
It started - God - he doesn't remember when. It was so long ago he was curled in his bed, a child, the morning still dark around him. He couldn't sleep: He was shaking, sweating, terrified. He dreaded morning, and what it brought, like a man headed for the gallows. When the light began to pour into his room, his parents would try to rouse him for school.
"I couldn't explain it to them because I didn't understand it," T.J. said. "I'd fight them, I'd physically fight them to the point where they'd give up and say, 'All right, he's not going,' and they'd say, 'We have to get to the bottom of this.' "
Sometimes, though, they'd get him to school, and T.J. would go straight to the boys bathroom and wait for the tears to dry.
"It's hard to describe," T.J. said. "It's to the point you feel trapped in a small area and you panic, like you can't get out. It would burn inside of me sometimes, to the point it would hurt."
In eighth grade, T.J. missed 40 days of school. He would be gone for two weeks, trapped inside his own mind, and when he returned his buddies would ask: "Where you been?"
"I was sick
," he'd tell them, "
I wasn't feeling good
." Whatever popped into his head, whatever sounded simpler, saner than the truth.
Said T.J.: "How do you explain something like that?"
Doctors tried. Therapists tried. T.J. would take medicine for one symptom, but it would exacerbate another. Even now, his diagnosis is long-winded.
"It's anxiety, severe anxiety, and depression and obsessive compulsive," he said, then pointed to his head. "I had it where thoughts would be so obsessive they would take over my life. If I saw something disturbing, or something was affecting my life in a negative way, it would constantly be on my mind. I couldn't concentrate."
After graduating from Glens Falls High School in 2000, T.J. enrolled at ACC to study and play basketball.
"When I spoke to him about coming here to play, he and his father were very honest about the issues he was dealing with," Haskell said.
Haskell said he did for T.J. something he never did for other players: He'd call and remind him about practice. Haskell remembered one afternoon he called T.J. at about 3:30 for a 4 o'clock practice.
"Oh yeah!"
Haskell recalled T.J.'s response: "
I'll be right over
"He was worth it," Haskell said. "The change in him from his first year to his second … I don't think he said five words to me off the court his first semester. By his last semester, he was in my office every day, talking up a storm, talking about everything."
These were the two years when T.J. faced himself. He learned about his faith, he focused on the basketball court and he poured his overflow of thoughts into music. He stopped taking anti-anxiety medication. He didn't eliminate the problems, but he learned to manage.
"Without the structure and purpose of religion in my life, I'd go crazy," he said. "I just can't help it, that's the way I was born: I have a hard time controlling my thoughts. The church, and the teaching and my beliefs in the afterlife, is unbelievably comforting to me. I just thought, 'Everyone has troubles, everyone has things they have to deal with and this is what I must deal with.' "
The basketball court is where T.J.'s thoughts, raging like a winter storm, subside and become concrete, immediate:
Is he open? Can I get all the way to the basket? Watch his eyes, watch his eyes …
The church and the court, thank God - literally. Who knows where he'd be?
"Really," T.J. said with a shake of his head, a playful smile on his lips, "Who knows?" An asylum somewhere, staring at a padded wall.
He still feels the panic daily: It burns in his gut like a swig of the whiskey he doesn't drink - alcohol is against the Mormon code - and threatens to master him. He plants his feet, steadies his mind.
Said T.J.: "When you're going through an attack like that, you can't live in the moment. You need to look ahead and know, 'Ok, I'm going to be playing basketball in 45 minutes and then I'm not going to feel this.' Because I've never had an anxiety attack that lasted forever, and I'm never going to."
He'll invoke strength from his God, the One who endured "every bit of pain and agony all at once."
He's sure his churning mind, harnessed, serves to inspire his music. This is from his song, "Mental Music":
"To write real music, I had to go real deep/I had to make reality from dreams that I see when I sleep/And then I held a trial in my brain to see who's guilty of supplying my pain who's to blame?/I'll figure it out when the verdict is handed in."
Rap-A-Lot Records asked for his demos in 2003, then followed with a second request. After mailing the second tape, T.J. waited. Like most musicians, the offer never came.
T.J. raps with a group called the "Designated Hittaz," or "DH," a collection of local rappers who pool their talents. Recently, in the basement of the Fredette house, T.J. met with two other members of "DH" as they organized for their Feb. 24 gig at Hotshots in Glens Falls, a venue they've previously filled to its 340-person capacity.
"How about we meet again on Sunday?" asked R.J., T.J.'s friend and DH groupmate. "Oh, my bad T.J., I know you got your church."
