It’s hard enough to say, but they’ve been super supportive and they check up on me. ![]() ![]() It’s kind of weird explaining to them what HCM is. JB: Have your teammates been just as supportive, if not more? Those type of things culminated to winning a national championship as well. And the amount of effort he took to understand my condition and trying to learn everything he can to make sure that it was safe for me to play? It was just a tremendous effort by him, and he’s just a great guy in general, a guy you want to be around. I thought my playing career was going to be over after I was diagnosed. Like you said, he understood everything that was going on. Jared: It definitely mended the relationship so well. How supportive was Coach Drew throughout your journey, and to cap it all with winning a championship? He said the two of them had something in common in that they treated their players like their own sons. I interviewed his brother, Bryce, a few years ago. He runs a very fast-paced two-way offense. JB: Your coach at Baylor, the great Scott Drew. This has been a great point in my life and I’m just trying to keep moving forward. You dream about where you want to be in life, and this is exactly what I’ve dreamt. Jared: It feels great because you dream about certain things. Just what is my life going to look like afterwards? And it just took a lot of faith and trust and learning about the condition to really move forward. What does this mean for my future? What does this mean for my health in general?Īnd being a basketball player, I was worried about basketball and continuing to play. Jared: There’s times in people’s lives, just moments where you’re like “Dang, that just wrecked my life.” Or, “That just changed my course of direction.” This was one of those moments, ‘cause I just wasn’t sure. You were very active already, so what was it like learning you had this heart condition? Like your mom just said, you grew up playing every sport under the sun. ![]() JB: Jared, this must have been very surprising for you too. No one had ever told me that I had HCM, so this was really tricky for me.Īnd for me to have the gene and not even know that I had any association with it until Jared’s came about, that really just was surprising to me. ![]() That was really a shock to me because I had never had any symptoms, any manifestation. That was really surprising to me because I was the one who carried the gene. Though not a New York sports story, theirs was too important not to share. They discussed not only how HCM positively affected his basketball journey, but their journey as a family as well. Jared and his mother, Juanea, recently took the time to sit down with ESNY. He’s a spokesman for a new website,, where people can research the mostly asymptomatic and congenital condition and know the signs. Four years ago, he was diagnosed with the heart condition hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, and is now looking to spread awareness of it. Butler averaged 15.2 points and five assists per game in the tournament and was named Most Outstanding Player.īut what many fans don’t know about Jared Butler is on top of having a lot of heart, he’s always monitoring it. He was instrumental in leading the scrappy and passionate Baylor Bears all the way to the final, where they defeated a tough Gonzaga squad. If there’s one thing Utah Jazz rookie Jared Butler has, it’s heart.Īnyone who watched the 2021 NCAA Tournament knows that. You’d never know it, but Utah Jazz rookie Jared Butler has been playing basketball with a heart condition for years.
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