“I wasn’t there just to get a quick story, but as someone who wanted to be there for the whole process – let’s call it a two-year process,” Shopkorn said. “It took a little time, but Lenny understood what I wanted to do. He began to trust me.”
Shopkorn turned his video camera on Cooke at Bortner’s home, where Cooke and Raimondi had adjoining rooms; at Cooke’s games for Old Tappan, where he averaged 31 points but fell short of a state championship; on Cooke’s visits to his old Bushwick neighborhood – the frequency of which concerned Bortner – even after his family had left Brooklyn for Virginia.
Most significantly, and symbolically, Shopkorn was in perfect position to record a moment that would become the most unforgettable, and haunting, of Cooke’s basketball life. It was the summer of 2001, weeks before 9/11, and Cooke returned to the popular ABCD Camp for the nation’s most prominent high school players at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Teaneck, N.J., campus as the defending most valuable player, the presumed chosen one.
“He was coming from being the No. 1 player in the country, and we all looked at Lenny like that,” said Anthony, who was born in Brooklyn but relocated to Baltimore. “It was his size, how strong he was, how he could pass the ball and play the point, kind of like Magic, I guess. He was really explosive.”