“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.”