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.”