She said the family’s trip to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics was reassurance that she and Boeheim didn’t need to have an explicit conversation about it.īoeheim was Team USA’s assistant coach, and that meant Buddy, Jimmy and Jamie spent time alongside players like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Juli never had to explain to the kids what their dad’s fame meant and how they should act because of it. “They made a name for themselves, even though the Boeheim thing is always going to follow them.” “They established themselves individually and grew stronger in their own ways,” Juli said. With the benefit of that space, this time around - with Jimmy and Buddy as teammates once more - will be different. Now at SU, that role has flipped after Jimmy used his extra COVID-19 eligibility to transfer from Cornell into a team centered around his younger brother, who became a national phenomenon last March. Buddy was the newcomer on Jimmy’s team, former teammates said. But after Jimmy graduated that year, the space helped both brothers grow at their own pace. “They used to play 1-on-1 more for fun, and now it’s like, ‘We don’t need to play 1-on-1 to know who’s better - we’re both our own selves.’”īoth brothers speak fondly of the last time they played together during the 2015-16 season at J-D since they didn’t expect to play side-by-side again after high school. But along those paths, they discovered how to handle the weight of the Boeheim name, and how to simultaneously build their own names. Their paths to SU were very different since they “were never destined to play together early,” Boeheim said. Part of it has to do with avoiding fights and “bad blood” since they’re teammates now, Buddy said.īut it also has to do with the maturing they did as individual players while they were apart for the past five years. Their 1-on-1 battles became sparse, and they have remained that way ever since, even as the two reunite - playing for their dad - at Syracuse this season. The siblings’ arguments stayed at home, rarely making their way into J-D’s practices or games. Controversy brewed regularly, so their dad, Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim, refereed.īut when the two played on the same team at Jamesville-DeWitt High School for a season and a half, that dynamic changed. Jimmy bent the rules by calling fouls or extending games when he was losing, Jamie said. Their matchups grew more intense around middle school. Their mom, Juli Boeheim, urged Jimmy to let his younger brother win occasionally. The cause of the playroom chaos less than two decades ago was a 1-on-1 basketball game between Jamie’s twin, Buddy Boeheim, and her older brother, Jimmy Boeheim, on the family’s plastic Little Tikes hoop. On the first floor of the Boeheim’s house, two brothers screamed, cried and fell on top of Jamie Boeheim as she tried to play with her Polly Pocket dolls.
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