Boys Among Men: How the Prep-to-Pro Generation Redefined the NBA and Sparked a Basketball Revolution

by Jonathan Abrams

  Tom Kaechele, the school’s athletic director, refused to believe the transfer until the moment Cooke and Bortner showed up in his office. The transfer proved similarly striking for Cooke. He had been around a few white people before, but never this many. He was one of only six African-Americans in the school. He had been in school, but not often, and only now, surrounded by college-bound students, did he realize how hopelessly far behind he had fallen. But his future was in basketball. “A publicity stunt” was how Cooke described his transfer to the high school in later years. Old Tappan was a pit stop, even if Cooke had to sit out for about a month to gain academic eligibility to play. One day an administrator suggested that Kaechele peek into the gym. Cooke was putting on a show before the student body. Kaechele walked the short distance from his office across the hall to the gym. School had only recently let out, yet it seemed as if half the student body packed the gym, where steel rods hung from the ceiling to support the basket. Cooke performed dunk after dunk to the applause of the students. Kaechele looked to the ceiling. The steel bars trembled. Dust danced to the ground. Kaechele worried that Cooke’s weight would bring down the basket and the steel bars. “You can’t jam in practice anymore,” he declared. “Those baskets are going to get ripped right out of the ceiling.” That day, Kaechele felt like the most unpopular administrator in the school.

  The plan of teaming Cooke and Brian Raimondi never materialized. Raimondi broke his wrist just a few days before Cooke became eligible. Cooke finally made his anticipated debut in late January 2001. He finished off an alley-oop within the first five seconds of the game against Northern Valley at Demarest and converted 17 of his 22 shots, outscoring the opposition by himself, 37–35. Kaechele watched the performance closely. He had once coached baseball at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and could spot an athlete when he saw one. Cooke was an athlete. He was so superbly gifted that it seemed defenders sometimes accidentally got in Cooke’s way. But Kaechele felt his advice to Cooke was not being heard and he was surprised at the first game to learn that Cooke was already a father. “Keep your head level,” Kaechele told him. “Stay with us. Ask us questions. Please keep us close to the situation. Please keep clean. Don’t take any of these offers. Let us know everything that’s going on.” Kaechele felt as though Cooke listened, but none of the words registered. “You can only offer so much and if they don’t sit down and take your advice, it’s pointless,” he said. “He was being pulled in nine thousand different directions when he was here. It was a lot of fun when it was happening, but there was a lot of stuff that made you think, Oh man, he’s going down the wrong path.” Kaechele believed that Cooke would make a living out of the sport. He was familiar with the trajectory of Bill Willoughby’s journeyman career and thought Cooke would be successful, even if he just emulated what many considered to be Willoughby’s disappointing time in the NBA. If that’s the path he’s going to take, then God bless him. He might be successful in that path, Kaechele rationalized. “Did I feel bad for him?” he said. “I just felt I had doubts. Trepidation, that’s the proper word. You knew it wasn’t going to be peaches and cream.” Still, he, like many others at the school, enjoyed the boost in interest that Cooke provided. A school that used to sell about 400 tickets a game now resorted to preselling some 900 seats. Fans packed the stands for the freshman game and stayed through the junior varsity game, all to ensure a seat to watch Cooke perform in the last matchup of the evening. Two security guards became about 10, some directing traffic and some making sure no fans snuck in through the back.

  The joyride lasted all of eight games. Kevin Brentnall, the young coach of Old Tappan, could not locate Cooke as the team prepared to play Sparta in a postseason tournament game. The bus was prepared to leave. Brentnall asked Kaechele what he should do.

  “What you should do is sit his rear end for at least the quarter, maybe the half,” Kaechele said. “I don’t care if it’s the state tournament or not. You’ve been down this road already with him this year. You know how irresponsible and immature he’s been. You can’t sacrifice the rest of your team. You’ve got to stick with your principles.”

  Cooke arrived at the game late. Brentnall sat him for the first quarter in a game lost, 69–63, in overtime. With that, Cooke had exhausted his high school eligibility. He was 19, yet still classified as a high school junior because of his transient high school beginnings. Cooke stayed for another year at the school as Brian Raimondi went off to college. He began returning to Brooklyn nearly every day, visiting old haunts and friends. Cooke came to resent being known, in his mind, as Lenny from Old Tappan. He wanted to be known as Lenny from Brooklyn. His friends teased him, saying that Bortner sought to make him white. Cooke listened. No one had really stood up for him in his life. Everyone had ulterior motives. He came to rationalize that Bortner only housed him to land a future payday off him. “Lenny, the only thing I care about is the color green,” Bortner would tell him. “It’s not black. It’s not white. It’s money. You want the money. God put you here to play basketball and that’s what you do. That’s what you do well. That’s your gift. Everybody gets something and that’s your gift.” She had all the money she needed. She had come to genuinely care for Cooke, although she still insisted he follow her rules. Those rules included attending school and not traveling into the city so often. Cooke, stubborn, left for a week and crashed from couch to couch before returning.

  Bortner had just returned from vacationing in Thailand when she tried stirring Cooke for school one morning. Cooke informed Bortner that he would not be attending school that day. Instead, he said, he would be moving to Michigan with his friend Damany Eastman to focus on basketball and finish school. Bortner knew that an agent had to be involved and Cooke could not make such a drastic decision alone. “I need to do this,” Cooke said, refusing to reveal who had facilitated the move. Bortner cried. “You’re selling yourself to the lowest bidder,” she argued. She knew Cooke had been given money. She thought of her own life trajectory, marrying at 18. I look back and wish my parents would have put handcuffs on me. If they had, Bortner knew she would have fought even more vigorously. That choice was hers and this one would be Cooke’s. On the cusp of adulthood, Cooke had to make mature choices, Bortner believed, and also live with the consequences.

  They hugged and both said, “I love you.” A driver arrived to take Cooke to the airport. Bortner’s tears continued as the black Town Car left her driveway.

  “It was not a moral thing to do, not at all,” Bortner said years later. “It was an immoral thing to take a child like Lenny from a home where he was being well taken care of. It’s not as if he needed that money. But when you come to a kid who came from somewhere with nothing and you wave that kind of cash in front of him—I don’t know. I don’t even know what to say. I just wish it had been different…So many people portrayed it as Lenny walked out on her. Lenny did this to her. Lenny did not do anything to me. Lenny did these things to himself. He didn’t hurt me. The only reason I was hurt is because I knew he was hurting himself.”

  At the time, Cooke believed he was helping his family. He knew that not playing and being out of the spotlight had affected his draft stock. Cooke said he met a runner for an agent from Immortal Sports & Entertainment named Terence Greene during one of his many late nights out in New York City. “I met him in a club one night, and he asked me if I wanted to be represented,” Cooke said. “And he was like, ‘Well, if you come to the hotel the next day and sign this contract with us, we got a lump sum of money for you.’ And that’s how it went down. I ended up going to the hotel, all of us went up there, I signed the contract, and he gave me the lump sum of money.”

  “How do you say no?” Cooke asked years later. “At the time, I wasn’t at Debbie’s. I wasn’t in Michigan yet. I was just here and there. I should have spoken to Debbie. Why I didn’t, I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

  Cooke said he received $350,000. “It lasted me probably a good year and a half, if that,�
�� he said. But Greene, a former University of Michigan coach, said that Cooke did not receive a lump sum of money. “Hell, no,” Greene said. “When Lenny said he was going pro, Lenny got a $30,000 credit line. He wanted more than that, but I wouldn’t let it happen.” Cooke felt conflicted over leaving Bortner’s home. “It was emotional at times when I first left…to go get represented by an agent that I knew nothing about,” Cooke said. “I just have been used a lot throughout my career. He was just one of the dudes that I was with in Michigan. He was one of the first people that showed me it’s a business. You can get fucked over, because they damn sure did it.”

  Cooke tried enrolling at Mott Adult High School in Flint, Michigan, in an attempt to gain a high school diploma. Greene had once coached at the school. Cooke said he was denied entry because the school year had already started. “I’ve never let somebody stay in my home,” Greene said. “Never. I don’t care what it is. But Lenny looked like he wanted to get his life together and get in school and work out and he wasn’t able to play basketball anymore. And that’s what we were focusing on, focusing on basketball and books, getting his diploma first and not trying to get to the NBA because Lenny, his mind was already made up that he was going pro.” Greene said he hoped that being away from home would help Cooke concentrate. He found him more distracted than ever during their training sessions. “He wasn’t playing well,” Greene said. “He went back to New York and what really happened with Lenny, in my opinion, was the NBA lifestyle and everybody pulling on him and really making him feel like he had got there before he got there…It was fighting, pulling teeth getting him back, because he was hanging in clubs all the time.”

  In May 2002, Cooke returned to New York for a press conference at Junior’s in Brooklyn. Six years earlier, Brooklyn’s own Stephon Marbury had picked that venue for his own declaration. Cooke wore black and he adorned his neck, wrist, and neck with shiny jewelry. “It was a hard decision for me,” he said, “but I’ve decided to put my name in the NBA draft.” Applause rang out from his friends. Bortner did not attend the event. Cooke said he had been assured of being selected in the first round by his agent, Mike Harrison, but he injured his right toe at the predraft camp and could not perform for teams. He hoped that organizations had already seen enough of his play. But teams were wary of his long layoff, concerned that he had left Bortner’s care, and worried about his overall commitment to the game. The night of the draft, Cooke felt like an expectant kid at Christmas, full of hopes and dreams, only to awaken to find nothing beneath the tree. He went undrafted, and a frustrated Cooke left Harrison, Greene, and their agency. “I wrote a note, got it notarized, I had my paperwork from the contract we had, had it notarized,” Cooke said. “I don’t owe you shit. I’m not committed to you anymore. I’m finished with you.”

  •••

  Emporia is a tiny Virginia city, a dot for most people on their way to larger hubs, not all that far from where Moses Malone once made a fateful decision to enter professional basketball out of high school. Local residents here take back roads past endless fields of green grass to avoid the highway patrolled by cops who strictly enforce the speed limit.

  It’s a humid summer day in June 2013. Anita Solomon, Cooke’s fiancée, opens the front door for a visitor. She excuses herself to attend to their young daughter and says Cooke will be out in a little while. Remnants of a dream dashed are abundant in the tiny home.

  News of Cooke popped up only intermittently since he had gone undrafted. He played for summer league entrants from the Boston Celtics and Seattle SuperSonics. He filtered through basketball’s domestic minor leagues and played in the Philippines and China. In late 2004, Cooke found himself in Los Angeles with the Jam of the American Basketball Association. He was not wearing a seat belt as a passenger in the car of teammate Nick Sheppard, while the pair made their way along rain-slicked Beverly Hills roads. Sheppard crashed the car into a light post. Sheppard, wearing a seat belt, sustained no major injuries. The accident left Cooke comatose with a broken left shin and femur. Doctors feared that he would lose the leg to amputation. They preserved it through two marathon surgeries, but cautioned him that his basketball career was likely over. Cooke was in a wheelchair for four months. His weight ballooned to about 275 pounds. Yet, the words of the doctors remained with him. Cooke began waking up every morning to jog on a treadmill and perform leg presses. He worked himself into decent enough shape to return to the Philippines and play. But he was not the same athlete as he had been. Cooke could no longer blow past defenders and instead plodded through them, backing them down. His body was not used to playing with the added weight. He ruptured one Achilles tendon, only to return to play again—this time with the Rockford Lightning of the Continental Basketball Association—before blowing out his other Achilles. His competitive playing career was over.

  He had had everything before he could appreciate it. He appreciated everything when he had nothing. For a while, Cooke was better known in New York City than any Knick or Net. With the exception of Kobe Bryant, perhaps no other high school player achieved the same level of superstardom at such an early age as Cooke had. His failing represented everything that goes wrong when a system is corrupted—from parents who provided little direction to an educational system that blindly promoted him and a basketball system eager to accept him as long as he produced. In recent months, he had made a resurgence. When his star power looked so bright, Adam Shopkorn, a young filmmaker, wanted to film a prep basketball star and document how he handled his growing fame. It took a while for Shopkorn to gain Cooke’s trust—everyone wanted something from him in those days—before Cooke finally allowed Shopkorn into his world, camera and all. The two lost touch as Cooke veered off the path to stardom. Shopkorn eventually picked the project back up and finished it with independent filmmaking brothers Joshua and Ben Safdie. Cooke had recently traveled to New York for a screening. He hoped the film would be a second beginning.

  Coming from around a corner, Cooke greets his visitor and asks for the visitor’s impressions of Emporia. “There ain’t nothing here, man,” he says. “Nothing here.” His once-powerful, athletic frame is gone, a casualty to time, injury, and inactivity. He looks more like an NFL offensive lineman than a basketball shooting guard. He offers a short tour. A framed photo of a younger, slimmer Cooke with Magic Johnson hangs on a mantel. “Those trophies came from the King tournament while I was at La Salle,” he says, motioning to massive trophies. “High Scorer Award and MVP of the Tournament—those came from Five-Star Camp. Those three in the middle, the plaque, and that. Those two right there, the one right behind the Five-Star, is the MVP of Rucker. The seven-footer is the Rucker Park Championship.”

  They live with their young daughter, Nyvaeh. Cooke came up with the name, a play on heaven spelled backward. Cooke’s son now lives in Brooklyn. Cooke is reflective and thoughtful.

  “I’m a mature man,” he says. “I ain’t in the best situation right now. I’ve been doing a lot of bullshit, but it ain’t about me no more. It ain’t about basketball or nothing like that for me no more. My family needs me more than anything now. At times, it bothered me. Especially when night comes around and it’s like, Damn, you know you are supposed to be there. The fellas sitting there like, ‘You see his bum ass on TV?’ Other than that, it don’t bother me.”

  When asked what he does for work, Cooke answers that he hopes to start a nonprofit and mentor young athletes. Other than that? “Being a father, looking for work,” he says. “I maintain.” He is at whatever peace one can find in being selected for greatness, close enough to see it, only to have it vanish. He is still conflicted, at times holding himself accountable and at other moments voicing anger at those who misled him. He occasionally disappears from home to visit Atlantic City and Brooklyn. “They made this person,” Cooke says. “I didn’t do it. I wasn’t the one who gave me the money, or allowed me to get bigheaded. Ranking me in the country, ranking me number one in the country or number one in the city. Allowing me i
n clubs I had no business in. They did this to me. They did that.”

  Cooke said he played for the amateur team that paid the most money. He considered himself a basketball mercenary. Payment of amateur players was prohibited, but organizations always offered, according to Cooke. “Whoever came with the most money, that’s who I played with,” Cooke would say years later. “Whether it was with Riverside, the Panthers, Gauchos, it didn’t matter. Whoever was going to give me the most money at the time, that’s who I was saving. All of them paid me. I know those are mistakes, but they made those mistakes, too. Because they aren’t supposed to pay no high school students to play or give me whatever they gave me.”

  “These guys, LeBron, Carmelo, Amar’e, they had their guidance,” he continues. “They had someone that was their coach from six years old or they had their father, who knows sports or played basketball. I didn’t have that. So all the decisions I made, it was either between me or Debbie, and nine times out of ten, I didn’t listen to her, either. It’s all bad luck. Sometimes, I think if I ever had good luck, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  That is part of the answer, but Cooke’s plight is more layered and nuanced. The start of his decline can be pinpointed to the ABCD camp in 2001, the year after he had trounced his competition. That summer, Cooke’s fall intersected with the rise of another player forecasted for NBA stardom.

  •••

  For days, Gary Charles had been warned by Maverick Carter that his friend from Akron, Ohio, would take the ABCD camp by storm. “Yeah, yeah,” Charles said in brushing him off. By then, Charles had heard and seen it all. He coached the Long Island Panthers, one of the country’s powerhouse AAU team. Like Chris Rivers, Charles had been with Vaccaro for years, linking up with him in 1991. Each year’s crop of campers brought a fresh wave of excitement. Charles was in the stands when Stephon Marbury took off near the foul line and dunked over a helpless, hapless defender. Bedlam broke out all at once. A once-sedate crowd awoke, leaping in unison, with some of the people streaming onto the court. Marbury nonchalantly walked out of the gym. Charles noticed that someone had caught the dunk on video. A line formed behind the cameraman. Every few seconds, Charles heard yells and gasps from whoever had just watched the replay. That was the atmosphere that the camp created. It was a party, a coronation, and a window into the future and the NBA’s next star. Kobe Bryant played at the camp the year after Marbury. Charles remembers Bryant lifting off from the corner, “like he started out in Atlanta, Georgia, made a turn around Maryland and came down in Jersey and dunked the ball so hard on someone that the place went crazy,” Charles said.