“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.
PART TWO WILL APPEAR TOMORROW IN THE RECENT POST SECTION