Lenny Cooke NY Times Article

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/sports/basketball/lenny-cooke-star-to-be-who-never-was.html

STONY CREEK, Va. — On an otherwise lazy Sunday, dinner took hours to prepare, filling the small one-story house on a remote and wooded street with the aromatic smell of chicken, ribs and all the trimmings. The extended family would soon be arriving, in full, hungry force.

Standing tall but cramped in the narrow kitchen at 6 feet 6 inches and not much less than 300 pounds, Lenny Cooke suddenly looked up from his culinary masterpiece.

“I went from being a superstar basketball player to being a cook,” he said wistfully, unmindful of the play on his name.

But cooking is only a pastime, not a profession, and Cooke, who will turn 30 next month, has yet to discover what or who he is supposed to be since it became obvious years ago that he would not fulfill his once presumed destiny and become an N.B.A. star.

A decade ago, many were predicting that Cooke, a New York City prodigy, would become a basketball shoe pitchman and would flaunt his wares and skills at All-Star weekends like the recent aerial show in Orlando, Fla. There was a time, however fleeting, when he was more heralded, or perhaps merely hyped, than any other high school player in America.

“No matter who it was against, where we were at, once I got rolling, I just felt I couldn’t be stopped,” he said.

Scant as it was, evidence of that other life was on display in a corner of the living room of the house Cooke shares with his girlfriend, Anita Solomon, and their young daughter, Nyvaeh. The handful of trophies was only a sampling, he said, of the many he had stored away at his mother’s house in Emporia, a nearby town close to Virginia’s border with North Carolina.

But on the wall of Cooke’s celebrity corner was his photographic treasure, proof that he had once walked among the most gifted and talented, and still could.

There was one shot of much younger Lenny, his thinner face partly hidden under a low-slung cap, posing with Magic Johnson. And there was contemporary Lenny, bloated in the years after injuries ended a career already marginalized, in the separate company of Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire at a Knicks game last season.

“When I see them, I get the most respect,” he said. “They knew how good I was.”

Cooke was a flashy 6-6 guard who struggled with academics and flirted with college before signing with an agent and entering the 2002 N.B.A. draft — only to go undrafted, never advancing beyond the summer-league teams of the Boston Celtics and the Seattle SuperSonics.

What went wrong? How did he miss by so much?

Stretched on the couch, glancing at a big-screen television, he shrugged and said, “You had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on another.”

After arriving with a phalanx of relatives, Cooke’s mother, Alfreda Hendrix, explained that her son had heeded the wrong calling and had mistaken what was given to him as something he had earned.

“He was a teenage kid, and every day, he had money in his pocket — and I don’t mean $200 or $300,” she said. “It was whatever he wanted, like the world was his, so he took advantage of it. I guess he didn’t figure that things were going to fall down because people kept telling him it was only going to get better and better. He made a lot of mistakes, but as far as his attitude, he’s changed now. He has matured a lot.”

Yet there remains a restless side to Cooke, a meandering and moody soul, the father of three (a son lives in Brooklyn and another daughter in Maryland) who will wander off for weeks at a time to Atlantic City, where he was born, or back to Brooklyn, where he lived during his early high school years.

This is where the story, still at its crossroads, becomes more complicated. Nobody seems to know what Cooke is looking for — closure from basketball and the key to his future, or the perpetuation of a legend that was never quite written.

Eclipsed Early On

The first time Adam Shopkorn read about Lenny Cooke, he could not shake the feeling that Cooke’s story had a big-screen, sequel-like quality, “Hoop Dreams” for the 21st century. Given the widespread raves for his all-around game, Cooke — unlike the popular 1994 documentary that followed two young Chicago players — seemed far more likely to end with a pot of N.B.A. gold.

Shopkorn, in his early 20s, quit his job with a Manhattan filmmaker and hauled his equipment up to Old Tappan, N.J., where Cooke, an African-American, was starring for the local public school while living with a wealthy white family. In that regard, the cinematic appeal was more “The Blind Side” than “Hoop Dreams.”

Four years earlier, Cooke had befriended a teammate, Brian Raimondi, on an Amateur Athletic Union team called the Panthers. Raimondi’s mother, Debbie Bortner, helped manage the squad. Cooke had only recently begun playing organized ball but was already more than 6 feet tall and quickly became the talk of the circuit.

The Panthers happened to have one future N.B.A. multimillionaire on their roster, but Joakim Noah, now of the Chicago Bulls, was only 5-9 on the way to 6-11 and completely in awe of Cooke.

“I was a 13-year-old French kid from Paris, and all of a sudden, I met Lenny and was watching him play in all of these tournaments,” said Noah, the son of the French tennis star Yannick Noah, whose mother had moved him to Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. “He was really my hero because the way he could dominate a game was unbelievable to me.”

Cooke began high school at Franklin K. Lane in Brooklyn and transferred to La Salle Academy in Manhattan to play with Raimondi. By junior year, with Cooke struggling academically, they hatched a plan to become teammates in Old Tappan.

While Raimondi nursed a broken wrist, Cooke was dominating the suburban competition when Shopkorn arrived to make his documentary pitch.

“I wasn’t there just to get a quick story, but as someone who wanted to be there for the whole process — let’s call it a two-year process,” Shopkorn said. “It took a little time, but Lenny understood what I wanted to do. He began to trust me.”

Shopkorn turned his video camera on Cooke at Bortner’s home, where Cooke and Raimondi had adjoining rooms; at Cooke’s games for Old Tappan, where he averaged 31 points but fell short of a state championship; on Cooke’s visits to his old Bushwick neighborhood — the frequency of which concerned Bortner — even after his family had left Brooklyn for Virginia.

Most significantly, and symbolically, Shopkorn was in perfect position to record a moment that would become the most unforgettable, and haunting, of Cooke’s basketball life.

It was the summer of 2001, weeks before 9/11, and Cooke returned to the popular ABCD Camp for the nation’s most prominent high school players at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Teaneck, N.J., campus as the defending most valuable player, the presumed chosen one.

“He was coming from being the No. 1 player in the country, and we all looked at Lenny like that,” said Anthony, who was born in Brooklyn but relocated to Baltimore. “It was his size, how strong he was, how he could pass the ball and play the point, kind of like Magic, I guess. He was really explosive.”

Anthony’s team was defeated by Cooke’s group. Cooke dazzled the packed gym and set up a showdown between him and a lesser-known player who was generating interest and who was one grade behind Cooke. His name was LeBron James, out of Akron, Ohio, a comparative basketball backwater.

During the camp, a person in the James entourage noticed Shopkorn’s shadowing Cooke and wanted to know why. When Shopkorn told him, the James ally said: “You should come up to Akron and shoot LeBron. He’s the real deal.”

Shopkorn declined the offer, electing to go with the known commodity, or at least the commodity he knew.

“Lenny was local, so you had all the media outlets there, all the newspapers, all the scouts and coaches,” Shopkorn said. “There was this buildup to the game, and it kind of took on a life of its own.”

Sitting in the stands with Debbie Bortner that day, Joakim Noah says he remembers Cooke’s climactic moment — crossing over James on the dribble several times before draining a midrange jumper. The gym erupted, but it was only the first half of a game that would go down to the last possession, a much leaner James with the ball and his team trailing by 2.

James had already outscored Cooke, 21-9, but he saved his best for last. Guarded by Cooke, he dribbled out of the backcourt, to his right. Just as he approached the 3-point line, with a step on Cooke, James went airborne, kicked his feet back and floated the ball toward the rim. He hit nothing but net — game over — while Cooke’s jaw dropped.

“How’d he make that?” he said to a friend afterward, mixing in profanity. “Oh my God.”

Sonny Vaccaro, the former sneaker company executive who founded the camp, was stunned to learn that Shopkorn had footage of what he considered to be a historic shot. He called it the “one physical moment that symbolized the beginning of LeBron and the downfall of Lenny Cooke.”

“He beat Lenny on his own turf,” Vaccaro said. “I mean, you can say it was one shot, one game, but in a way, Lenny never recovered.”

James would land on the cover of Sports Illustrated and star in a nationally televised high school game on ESPN. With his scholastic eligibility exhausted, Cooke was limited during his senior year to all-star classics and pickup games.

He would never again be considered the next brand name. Anthony, who left New Jersey the day before the Cooke-James showdown, said, “After that, we just didn’t hear very much about him.”

With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, Cooke can plainly see now that the angel on his shoulder was Debbie Bortner.

“I look back and wished I would have listened to what she and other people were telling me about school,” he said. “It’s up to you to make your own decisions about who you’re going to surround yourself with because your image is more important than anything else.”

Whether Cooke would have repaired his academic record enough to play at St. John’s — the university he said had interest in attending — is impossible to know. But it all became moot when in the early spring of 2002, he suddenly packed up the neatly stacked row of jerseys and sneakers in Bortner’s home.

Moving On

He went to Flint, Mich., to live with a new benefactor, a former college player and recruiter named Terence Greene, seemingly to pursue a high school equivalency diploma.

Cooke had grown tired of hearing that he was Lenny of Old Tappan, not Lenny from Brooklyn. His family chafed over the news media’s focus on Bortner, who nonetheless pleaded with him to stay.

“We never had an argument; it was never angry,” Bortner said. “Lenny hugged me when he left. We both were in tears. I knew he was making a mistake, but it was more like when you have to let your own child go to find out for himself what the world is like. Unfortunately, people misinterpreted it as Lenny being disloyal, and that he wasn’t a good person.”

Vaccaro said the perception only worsened when Cooke arrived in Chicago soon after to play in an all-star game, the Roundball Classic, firmly in the clutches of people pushing him in the direction of the draft.

“There was already a mystery about him when he left Debbie, people starting to wonder about his character,” Vaccaro said. “That’s not to say he was a bad guy — because he wasn’t. Just one of those kids who listens to the last person who tells him something. And there were people all around him — agents, runners — glorifying him, giving him things. He took everything.”

Vaccaro recalled a conversation with Cooke — a lecture, really — in which he warned him about making a good impression in Chicago, not doing anything to fuel the already burning speculation.

“I told him, ‘Every N.B.A. scout is here, and they’re watching you,’ ” Vaccaro said. “I said, ‘If you’re going to do something stupid, don’t do it this week, or do it in your room.’ And what happens? It’s 1 o’clock in the morning, people are hanging around in the lobby of the Hyatt, and here comes Lenny with his entourage, all the partiers, all the jewelry. I said: ‘What the hell are you doing? We talked about this.’ ”

Cooke by that time was driving a new Mercedes and with Bortner had distanced himself from his personal documentarian — though not before Shopkorn recorded his choreographed declaration for the N.B.A. draft at Junior’s restaurant in downtown Brooklyn. Tears rolled down Cooke’s cheeks as he held his young son, Anahijae, and told reporters that he was ready to run with the world’s best.

June 26, 2002. Cooke waited anxiously at a Manhattan hotel, expecting his name to be called in the lower part of the first round or early in the second. Yao Ming was the first pick that night, going to Houston. Stoudemire, one of Cooke’s main rivals in his grade, went ninth to Phoenix, also out of high school. The night dragged on. Players Cooke had never heard of — some from countries he had never heard of — were selected, 58 in all.

“I waited, I waited, I waited,” he said. “Like on Christmas Day, you think you’re getting this toy, and then Christmas comes, it’s not under the tree. It breaks you down emotionally. I broke down, realized I got bad advice. But you wonder, why not? Why didn’t my name get called?”

No longer a commodity, no longer surrounded by those seeking to cash in on an prospective fortune, Cooke was soon looking for new representation and a place to play. He tried the new N.B.A. developmental vehicle, known as the D-League, but carried a star’s sense of entitlement. Or maybe it was a case of not enough desire. In one of Shopkorn’s many recorded scenes, Cooke responded to a request for a 6:30 a.m. training session at a camp with incredulity, wondering why the start time couldn’t be changed to 8.

He didn’t last long in the D-League and landed in the old United States Basketball League the next spring. He scored 47 points one night for the Brooklyn Kings, with the original Brooklyn King — the Knicks legend named Bernard — watching from courtside, intrigued by what he saw while pointing out the schoolyard tendencies that haunted Cooke’s game.

But Cooke averaged about 30 points a game in the U.S.B.L., and that earned him a shot with the Boston Celtics’ summer-league team. He had a couple of decent games and relished the challenge of matching up against Cleveland and James, the top pick of the 2003 draft. But Cooke did not play a minute. James, already hailed as the King, took a moment to console him.

Cooke played a season in the Philippines, then drifted to China for a spell. By December 2004, his now-transient life took him to Southern California, where he headed out for dinner on a rainy night after a game with a teammate from the Long Beach Jam of the American Basketball Association. Cooke was not wearing a seat belt when his teammate Nick Sheppard crashed his car into a light post.

Cooke awoke from a coma, spent months in a wheelchair, fortunate that his shattered left leg did not have to be amputated, as doctors first feared. Limping, still dreaming, he returned to the Philippines, then tore his Achilles’. Back in the old Continental Basketball Association with the Rockford Lightning, the coach, Chris Daleo, saw that Cooke had never properly rehabilitated his leg. He was overweight.

“I put him with our trainer and thought if we could get him back in shape, he still might play somewhere,” Daleo said. “Lenny was a likable guy, somebody you wanted around. You just wished you could turn back the clock for him. Even when he was out of shape, dragging his leg, you could see he had the tools. LeBron is what you had, only rawer.”

But after the team moved to Minot, N.D., Cooke blew out his other Achilles’. Bad luck compounding imprudent decisions, his career was over, a half-dozen years after his showdown with James. The question echoed: was Cooke ever really that good or merely the beneficiary of the New York buzz?

“You can’t put him in the group of New York guys that were overhyped,” Vaccaro said. “What it came down to was a complete mistrust in who and what he was. Teams were afraid.”

Vaccaro insisted that Cooke’s shattered hoop dreams were far more authentic than those of William Gates and Arthur Agee, chronicled by the director of “Hoop Dreams,” Steve James.

“Lenny was on the pedestal because he was one of those elite guys,” Vaccaro said. “He was damn good. I just think he blew it all.”

Future in Question

Amar’e Stoudemire did not recognize the smiling man advancing toward him, dressed in oversize clothing to camouflage his ample girth. Recognition only came when the man could lean close and say, “It’s me, Lenny Cooke.”

Stoudemire did a double take before embracing Cooke.

“It had been a few years, and he had picked up a hundred pounds or so,” Stoudemire said, recalling the moment. “It was a little shocking.”

The courtside scene that took place after a Bulls-Knicks game at Madison Square Garden last April repeated itself with Anthony, who would say: “Just to see him now, not doing anything, as far as basketball goes, and so much bigger, it just seemed sad. You wondered why.”

Trying to answer that question was Shopkorn, who accompanied Cooke to the game to record his reunion with Stoudemire, Anthony and his long-ago fervent admirer Joakim Noah. With Shopkorn was Josh Safdie, a New York-based independent filmmaker brought on board by Shopkorn — along with Safdie’s brother, Benny — after Shopkorn reconnected with Cooke and resumed his long-dormant project.

Friends would occasionally ask Shopkorn, who had become an independent art adviser and curator, whatever happened to the documentary “with the basketball player.” Some would remember the name, Lenny. Others would mistakenly say LeBron. They only knew it was someone who was supposed to be famous.

On the afternoon that Cooke was preparing dinner for his family, Shopkorn and Josh Safdie made the now-familiar drive trip from Manhattan to Stony Creek, a town of around 200. It was late December, the sounds of televised football providing a daylong soundtrack. Cooke was clearly delighted and energized by the camera as he played with his daughter, prepared the dinner and shared his career perspective with a reporter.

“At first it was difficult,” he said of the years after he stopped playing. “I saw guys I grew up playing with, guys I was better than. I couldn’t watch anything LeBron would do — know what I’m saying? I thought I should have been where he is.”

Cooke never did get to play against James again, or to know him. But he insisted that he never resented his runaway success and dismissed criticism of James’s playoff failures.

“I mean, look at where he is, how much money he makes and where he came from,” he said. Cooke grew quiet, then shook his head. “From where I’m sitting, right here, I wish the only thing they could say about me was that I have no championship ring.”

Cooke’s weight ballooned because he was inactive, deflated and took full advantage of the culinary skills he had honed when he was in the Philippines and China, and would call his mother for tips on home cooking. When he would Google himself online, the only easy-to-locate video of him in action was of his first game at Old Tappan.

Most online references to Cooke identify him as the inverse of James, which he has come to accept as his legacy with a mix of resignation and resolve.

“As long as every time I go on the Internet and somebody is talking about Lenny and LeBron, I guess my name’s still being mentioned with this guy — you know what I’m saying?” Cooke said. “Give my kids something to read, some way to know without me telling them that I was there with LeBron, a guy with a $100 million contract. It used to bother me when they said, ‘Lenny Cooke was supposed to be something and he isn’t.’ Not anymore. I’m living my life.”

Cooke could yet attach a more lasting meaning to his aborted basketball life, said Noah, who has expressed conditional interest about participating in Shopkorn’s film.

“I mean, there’s so many kids out there getting — I’m not going to say raped by the system — but really getting taken advantage of,” he said. “That’s the question people don’t ask enough when they talk about Lenny Cooke. I mean, this isn’t the story of a kid shooting hoops in his backyard in the Midwest. There was so much thrown at him when he was so young.”

Father Figure Missing

Noah recalled traveling with his father on the tennis tour as a young boy and rooting for him to lose in the first round so they could spend time together.

“Debbie tried to do that for Lenny, but he never really had that male figure,” Noah said. “Those are the things Lenny needs to talk about, but if it’s going to be for the benefit of kids he’s also got to have a positive message at the end.”

That is easier said than done when Cooke is still at a crossroads. Last summer, when Cooke was spending time in Atlantic City, and jogging up and down the court in a recreational league, a friend arranged for him to speak to children at a Boys and Girls Club. He arrived by limousine and — as he occasionally still does — spoke of returning to his former playing weight of 200-plus pounds and making a comeback.

Cooke worked for a food distributorship after returning to Virginia but is currently unemployed. Solomon, his girlfriend, commutes about an hour to a hair salon in Richmond and hopes to open her own closer to home.

Daleo, his former coach in Rockford and in Minot, said he had been contacted several times in recent years by people interested in doing one project or another on Cooke.

“To be honest, I wish some of these people would just give Lenny a job,” he said.

A decade ago, Shopkorn was willing to stake his future on Cooke. Now Cooke lobbies Shopkorn to stay longer when the time comes to leave after a day of shooting video. Cooke said he was excited by the chance to spread his message — stay in school and steer clear of the industry flesh peddlers — far and wide. But the attention is intoxicating.

“I do know that by coming back and putting cameras in his face and providing him with all this attention, it’s inevitable that there’s going to be a return to the feeling that he’s the star again, like he was in 2001,” Shopkorn said.

But he believes this is one cautionary tale of the tapes that should be told. All that is lacking is the happier ending that Noah, Bortner and the others still in Lenny Cooke’s corner are hoping for.

Or more to the point: a promising new beginning.