Star-That-Be: Who Never Was

Cooke was a flashy 6-6 guard who struggled with academics and flirted with college before signing with an agent and entering the 2002 N.B.A. draft – only to go undrafted, never advancing beyond the summer-league teams of the Boston Celtics and the Seattle SuperSonics.

 What went wrong? How did he miss by so much?

Stretched on the couch, glancing at a big-screen television, he shrugged and said, “You had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on another.” After arriving with a phalanx of relatives, Cooke’s mother, Alfreda Hendrix, explained that her son had heeded the wrong calling and had mistaken what was given to him as something he had earned. 

“He was a teenage kid, and every day, he had money in his pocket – and I don’t mean $200 or $300,” she said. “It was whatever he wanted, like the world was his, so he took advantage of it. I guess he didn’t figure that things were going to fall down because people kept telling him it was only going to get better and better. He made a lot of mistakes, but as far as his attitude, he’s changed now. He has matured a lot.” Yet there remains a restless side to Cooke, a meandering and moody soul, the father of three (a son lives in Brooklyn and another daughter in Maryland) who will wander off for weeks at a time to Atlantic City, where he was born, or back to Brooklyn, where he lived during his early high school years.

This is where the story, still at its crossroads, becomes more complicated. Nobody seems to know what Cooke is looking for – closure from basketball and the key to his future, or the perpetuation of a legend that was never quite written.

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