LEXINGTON, Ky. — CJ Fredrick is finally healthy now. Team doctors told him Tuesday that he will be fully cleared to begin preseason practice, and Fredrick is hopeful for a much more action-packed sequel at Kentucky. But if someone made a movie about his first year with the Wildcats, the opening scene would show him hanging from the rim at Madison Square Garden last November, grimacing in terrible pain and afraid to let go. Cue a record scratch and The Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” In a voiceover, Fredrick would tell the audience: Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation. And we’re off. But let’s start from the beginning.

Fredrick is no stranger to injury. Since winning Gatorade Kentucky Player of the Year, leading Covington Catholic to a state championship at Rupp Arena and earning Sweet Sixteen MVP as a high school senior in 2018, there have been more painful days than pain-free ones. He took a charge and cracked a rib during his redshirt year at Iowa. He played his whole redshirt freshman season for the Hawkeyes on a bum ankle, then found out he had a Jones fracture in his right foot that required offseason surgery. He battled plantar fasciitis — ligament inflammation that causes an unrelenting, stabbing sensation — in his left foot throughout his redshirt sophomore season, which meant he rarely practiced and had to sit out four games.

Then something wonderful happened after he transferred home to Kentucky last summer. Fredrick briefly experienced relief. For a few glorious weeks, nothing hurt. He started shedding extra weight and getting back into shape and imagining what it would be like to play at Rupp again, this time for the home team. But shortly after his 22nd birthday, in the middle of July, he noticed a small bump on his left shin. It ached a little, but after all he’d been through it didn’t seem like much. Just to be sure, Fredrick mentioned it to the team trainer. Just to be safe, the trainer ordered an X-ray. You’ll never guess what happened next.

Stress fracture. Surgery required. Fredrick needed a metal rod in his leg and about four months to recover.

“That was really frustrating, because I was just starting to get my body right and figure out what my role was going to be on the team, and I came in wanting to really hit the ground and show what I could do,” Fredrick says. “That’s one of those injuries that you can take the risk and not do anything with it, but then, remember what happened to Kevin Ware? (In a gruesome scene, the former Louisville guard snapped his leg during a 2013 NCAA Tournament game.) That’s what can happen. So when the doctor said that, it was a no-brainer to get the surgery. And I’ve had no problems with it since.”

He was a man on a mission in rehab, hell-bent on getting back before the Wildcats’ season started. And he succeeded. He won the 3-point shooting contest at Big Blue Madness and was cleared for a full return to practice about a month before the Champions Classic opener against Duke at MSG. His first day back, though, Fredrick felt a tug in his left hamstring. He tried to shake it off, until he couldn’t. Defending teammate Kellan Grady, Fredrick planted his left leg to change directions and crumpled to the court. It was only a minor strain, but that meant he was shut down for three more weeks. One last clearance came in the days before Kentucky traveled to New York.

On the eve of that first game, Fredrick had barely practiced, but he felt good, and his stroke looked great, and coach John Calipari told him, “Hey, if I need you, be ready.” In the tunnel pregame, adrenaline kicked in. Fredrick sprung up off the floor at the Garden and dunked with ease his first time through the layup line. No problem, no pain.

“The second time, though, I knew it was bad,” Fredrick says. “I went up to dunk again and felt everything in my leg rip. It immediately started to burn. I kind of hung on the rim for a minute, because I was scared to get down.”

When he eventually landed and hobbled to the bench, however, he made a bold choice. He kept his latest injury to himself, not realizing — or maybe just not accepting — how severe it was. As the game wore on, the Blue Devils pulled ahead and Kentucky struggled to make an outside shot, Calipari began pacing the sideline and scanning his bench for answers.

“I was thinking, ‘Please don’t put me in. Please don’t put me in,’” Fredrick says. “I would’ve just collapsed if he had. Every timeout, I could barely get up and walk.”

Still, he didn’t tell anyone what happened. He prayed that this was just a tweak, that this latest injury felt worse than it really was. But by the time the team plane landed back in Lexington, around 2 a.m., Fredrick’s left thigh had swollen so much it was nearly double in size. The back of his leg was black and blue. Even then, he didn’t alert Kentucky’s training staff or the coaches. He tried instead to go to bed.

“I was laying there with some of the worst pain I’ve ever had,” he says. “My leg was throbbing. I woke up Kellan (Grady), my roommate, and said, ‘Bro, you gotta take me to the hospital, because this is terrible.’ I didn’t want to call our trainer, Geoff (Staton), at that point, because I didn’t think he’d be awake. God love Geoff, though, he came over at like 6 a.m. on basically no sleep and told the hospital, ‘We’ll take it from here.’ When the team doctor got there, he examined me, and I could tell on his face something was not right. I said, ‘Be honest. Is it bad?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty bad.’”

Fredrick’s left hamstring had completely snapped on that second pregame dunk attempt at Madison Square Garden, the muscle pulling away from the bone and recoiling all the way back up to his buttocks. A surgeon had to retrieve it, unroll it and reattach it. Post-op, Fredrick was fitted for a brace that locked his left leg in place from ankle to hip. For the two months he wore it — the first month, even when he slept — he couldn’t bend that leg an inch. That was miserable, but folks around Fredrick worried more about the mental toll. How would he handle yet another injury disrupting his basketball career?

“When I had the first surgery on my leg, I was asking, ‘Why me? I do everything right, work so hard, love basketball. I don’t understand why this is happening to me,’” Fredrick says. “But it’s weird, when the hamstring injury happened, my mindset just totally changed. I called my parents, and we cried over the phone for a little bit, then I told them when I hung up, ‘There’s no more crying, no more negativity. From this point forward, I’m going to be positive.’ I told my teammates what happened and hugged Coach Cal and told him I was sorry, because I felt like I could really help the team. But I also told them, ‘I promise you I’m going to help you win games next year.’ After that injury, I would not let anyone be negative with me, told people I did not want, ‘I feel bad for you,’ none of that. Something just clicked in my head: I’m going to turn this into a positive.”

His girlfriend, Blair Green, might have had something to do with that. Ten days before his hamstring injury, she ruptured an Achilles tendon during a UK women’s basketball scrimmage. The senior guard had surgery exactly a week before his fateful leap at MSG. By mid-November, they were both on crutches. They watched Netflix together with their opposite legs — his left, her right — propped up, side by side.

Their first attempt at getting out of the house was a trip to Target. When everyone in the store stopped to stare (and then laugh) at the two UK basketball players awkwardly crutching along, they hobbled right back out the door, red with embarrassment but giggling at how absurd they must’ve looked. They would not let each other sulk or sink into depression. And once rehab started, their competitive nature kicked in.

“That’s why we go so well together,” Green says, “because we’re both very positive people and both big in our faith and always just looking on the bright side, and we’re both really hard workers. We both understood that this was just a little trip-up in our journey. Sometimes I’d say, ‘You know I didn’t want you to get injured, but if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened when I got injured, so we could both have someone who understands what we’re going through.’ And all along the way, we’ve really just motivated each other every day.”

With men’s and women’s basketball under the same roof at the Joe Craft Center, Fredrick and Green often found themselves in the training room getting treatment or weight room doing rehab at the same time — and eventually on the court putting each other through drills. When Green’s rehab called for picking up marbles with her toes, that turned into a contest with Fredrick. “Our trainers loved us, because we didn’t want to let the other person win,” she says. Of course, that’s not entirely true. At the end of every day, they shared one thing they’d done to get better. They became each other’s biggest cheerleader.

“Celebrating the small achievements really helped,” Green says. “We made them a huge deal and just kept pushing each other. Watching him work so hard really made me never want to slack, and I was always in his ear, like, give it all you got today. Having someone in your corner who is so competitive, but also so positive and encouraging, is huge when you’re trying to get through something like this. We held each other accountable but also lifted each other up. Sometimes if I was doing homework and he didn’t have anything to do, I’d catch him watching his old game film and all of a sudden I’m watching it too, just sitting there hyping him up: That’s gonna be you in Rupp next year.”

That thought has sustained Fredrick since his hamstring surgery. Rather than mope about all the moments he missed last season — when Kentucky blew out North Carolina, Kansas and Tennessee on its way to a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament — Fredrick imagined himself in moments like those next season. He tries not to dwell on the thought that, had he been healthy, maybe all those other injuries in UK’s backcourt wouldn’t have derailed a promising season, which ended with a first-round loss to 15th-seeded Saint Peter’s. He prefers to focus on things like the roar at Rupp Arena when Grady splashed his go-ahead 3-pointer during a thrilling comeback against Alabama. Fredrick made a mental note that day: I want them to roar for me.

“All that stuff motivated me,” he says. “I’d be walking on the treadmill envisioning myself hitting a big shot at Rupp. Every day, I tried to come in and imagine playing next season there, helping us win, cutting down nets at the SEC championship, cutting down nets at the Final Four. That kept me going every day.”

Fredrick cut out all soft drinks and chugged at least a gallon of water each day. He cut out fried food, and for 3 1/2 months ate a strict diet that was heavy on chicken, rice and vegetables. He worked out twice a day, lifting heavy with his upper body and doing the maximum he was allowed with his lower body. He graduated from an elliptical machine to flat-road walks around campus to 45-minute treadmill walks on an incline to light jogging and on-court workouts. He shed about 25 pounds, from 205 to 180. He got his body fat percentage down from 20 to 10. Kentucky’s former strength coach posted impressive before-and-after photos, in which Fredrick has transformed from doughy to chiseled.

“Oh, gosh,” Green says, “He’s always flexing now.”

They both seem to enjoy his new look, but Fredrick really loves how he feels.

“As weird as it is to say, all of this was like a blessing in disguise,” he says. “I came here not feeling really good about my body. Then after my first leg surgery, I felt like I had to rush to get back and try to play. But doing this has let me get in the best shape I’ve ever been in and mentally take a step back and just focus on next season. I’ve been hurt quite a bit in my career and never really had that time to just take care of me. Now I’m taking care of me. I’ve gotten my hips strong, my upper body strong, my hamstrings strong, everything strong and healthy so there’s no overcompensating for one area that’s too weak, and I feel really, really good right now.”

Getting to this point has taken a major commitment. Fredrick stayed on campus when the rest of the team went home for a few weeks this spring. He spends about five hours a day on his body now: strength training and explosive movements at the rehab clinic, then hip mobility exercises and treatment with UK’s trainer, then weight lifting, then a lengthy stretching routine, then on-court drills, then more treatment and a soak in the cold tub. He’s recently done box jumps, 100-yard sprints and dribble pull-ups, bounding off that left leg (he’s a left-legged leaper) with no pain or tightness. He will use a five-week ramp-up process to be full go when the team begins practicing for its preseason Bahamas exhibition trip in early August.

“It all feels fine,” Fredrick says, “which is really encouraging. In fact, my left leg is a little stronger than my right now.”

Fredrick would’ve entered last season as the nation’s leading returner in career 3-point percentage (46.6) with a minimum of 150 attempts. He hit 83 of 178 3s in two seasons at Iowa, where he started all 52 games he played and averaged 8.7 points, 2.3 assists and less than a turnover per game. Only seven Kentucky players in history have attempted as many 3s as Fredrick and made better than 40 percent in their careers. So how’s that shot looking these days?

“I haven’t lost it,” Fredrick says.

“He don’t miss,” Green confirms. They have regular shooting competitions and, she says, “I’m telling you, that boy don’t miss.”

Point guard Sahvir Wheeler said last week during a youth basketball camp that Fredrick is “an elite, elite, elite, elite shooter.” But Fredrick wants Kentucky fans to know he’s so much more than that.

“They’re getting someone who will play with a ton of energy, who loves the game so much that when I play, I forget everything and get caught up in the moment and maybe I say or do things I shouldn’t, but that’s just because I’m so competitive,” he says. “I play with a lot of swag — maybe sometimes a little too much and people don’t like it — but that’s just who I am. I have that dog mentality. When I was in high school, my uncle who played at Notre Dame said, ‘I’ll be real honest with you: If you want to make it at the college level, you’re going to have to do something besides make shots to stand out. That might mean you have to play with a little edge.’ Ever since then, that’s kind of been my thing. I play with a lot of heart.”

Maybe that’s how he ended up hanging from a rim last November in New York, wondering how he was going to get down. He’s always wanted to play so badly that he never gave his body a chance to truly recover. This time, Fredrick had no choice. Ripping a hamstring clean off the bone has a way of forcing you to press pause. He’s finally, fully healthy, and a Kentucky team with national championship aspirations is hopeful that he’s ready to get through a basketball season without injury for the first time in five years. Considering they don’t have another sharpshooter on the roster, you could say Calipari and the Cats are betting on it.

(Top photo: Grace Bradley / UK Athletics)