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joec32033
Posts: 30632
Alba Posts: 37
Joined: 2/3/2004
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USA
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http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/basketball/story/441707p-372051c.html
Cooke stirring
After surviving crash, story takes right turn
By MICHAEL OBERNAUER
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
Lenny Cook shows he has handle on ball and life.
In New York basketball parlance, the name Lenny Cooke has for years been a byword for flameout, a two-word cautionary tale. But on the courts of the Uptown League in Englewood, N.J., they know him by a different name these days.
"They call me 'The Comeback Kid,'" a beaming Cooke told the Daily News.
And for once, the people around Lenny Cooke aren't just blowing smoke. Cooke scored a game-high 35 points to lead his team, Uptown Haircutters, to a 101-91 win over Up The Hill on Sunday — but his mere participation is the more remarkable part of the story.
Cooke has long been known as a sort of LeBron James control experiment, the working example of what happens when kids lunge too quickly at NBA riches. The kid from Brooklyn was a hoops prodigy and an academic mess at six different high schools who chose to trust and follow people who were giving him destructive advice. Having already shunned a procession of colleges with scholarships at the ready, Cooke — too unpolished, too arrogant, too immature for NBA teams — went untouched in the 2002 draft.
From there, Cooke began kicking around pro leagues just as he did high schools — and it was during one of these stops that he hit a setback far worse that any ill-fated draft day.
On Dec. 9, 2004, Cooke and Nick Sheppard, teammates on the Long Beach Jam of the ABA, were driving home from a postgame dinner when their car careened off a slick road in L.A. and into a light post. Sheppard, the driver, suffered only minor injuries, but as Jam president Steve Chase put it after the crash: "Lenny wasn't wearing a seat belt, and he's lucky to be alive."
The crash shattered Cooke's left femur and shin; doctors feared they'd be forced to amputate. Two grueling surgeries over the course of a week improved the outlook for his leg, but not so much for his athletic career.
"The doctors basically told me I was done playing basketball," Cooke says.
By the time Cooke finally stepped out of his wheelchair in April of last year, his weight had ballooned to 275 — about 40 pounds heavier than usual with less muscle mass. He had no multi-million NBA contract to lean on, no team to return to.
"Basically, I was doing everything on my own," Cooke says. "I'd get up, go to my gym, work on the treadmill, work on the track, do leg presses. It was not at all (easy)."
Cooke, now 23, signed on with the Rockford Lightning of the CBA last November, and while he saw limited minutes in just 20 games before being waived in February, for him, that wasn't really the point.
"They gave me an opportunity to work and get better," he says. "They let me work with a trainer and everything, and it basically got a whole lot easier. They started showing me how to do things I couldn't really do on my own."
Today, 20 months after the crash, the 6-6 Cooke weighs 230 pounds and says he finally feels "totally healthy, 100%." He certainly showed as much in scoring his 35 Sunday and helping his team knock off Uptown League's '05 champ.
"We're looking good," he says of the 5-0 Haircutters. As for his mental makeup these days, Cooke says: "I'm definitely a different person with all I've been through. I'm more humble now. I put no one now before God and my children," son Anahije, 6, and daughter Heavyn, 2.
Cooke is considering an autumn return to the Philippines, where he spent the 2003-04 season ("I love it there, man," he says). He still dreams of a bright future in hoops, that there will be a place for him in the NBA. But for now, Lenny Cooke is back on the sun-drenched courts of New Jersey, playing basketball again. That, all by itself, is something.
"I'm just so happy to be back playing, man," he says. "I just feel God put me on this Earth to play basketball. Because if not, God would have taken me in that car crash."
~You can't run from who you are.~
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