There is a book in the making about Lenny Cooke, and it will have nouns and verbs, and sentences that crackle with the descriptive detail of growing up in extreme poverty, and anecdotes that lift the soul, and take-you-there dialogue that captures the seductive rhythm of the Brooklyn streets that Cooke cannot, will not leave behind. It will have passages that absolutely break the reader's heart, and sketches on the white-hot life of basketball supernova, and insight on an American culture that at times values entertainment on the order of food, water and shelter.

	Lenny Cooke, center, has a colorful background, but just where the New York City hoops star is headed remains uncertain.

Surely, it will be a fine book. Chapter One, born to a teenage mother at the outset of a Reagan revolution. Chapter Three, stepping past the junkies and whores on the way to school. Chapter Five, getting discovered in a pair of hush puppies. Chapter Six, arriving at a Vegas summer camp in a Lear Jet and other tales of livin' large. Chapter Seven, unfolding this week, the No. 1 senior in the country theorizes that maybe his local fame is getting the best of him, and that he needs to get far away.

The next few chapters are to be determined. He's only 19! But the possibilities are endless and endlessly delicious, especially if his fast-unfolding life wends through the first round of the NBA draft in the coming years. He only knows he wants to take some of that loot to raze the abandoned buildings on his old block and erect a movie theater and YMCA for the neighborhood kids. That'll be a chapter.

The big question is who will pen this best-seller in the making.

"I," Cooke announces with an oral chest thump, "want to write a book on myself."

And there's the rub.

As budding authors go, Lenny Cooke is an uneducated man.

Actually, Lenny Cooke is a genius. In one manner, at least. Two years ago, his former summer-league coach and educational benefactor, Debbie Bortner, had him tested for learning disabilities. This is what parents with enough resources often do when their kids aren't performing in school. They hire someone to figure out how a child's brain works, whether the wiring is faulty in more than a half-dozen or so clinically recognized ways. Cooke is not Bortner's son, but he's lived with her, and she loves him, and she and her husband are loaded. They own the Lear. She flies to Boca Raton to get her hair done.

College Basketball's Graduation Crisis

Outside the Lines, ESPN's award-winning investigative show, examines the issue of poor graduation rates for black basketball players, Friday at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN. NCAA statistics show that 36 college teams graduated no black players among the five most recent entering classes that were evaluated. The show includes features that look at the value of the education that Duke players receive; Nolan Richardson's poor graduation rate at Arkansas; and the controversial way that the graduation rate statistic is calculated. Also included is a profile of top recruit Lenny Cooke, one of the many academically borderline athletes trying to meet the NCAA's minimum entrance standards. The show will re-air Tuesday, March 5 at 3 a.m. ET and Friday, March 22 at 1 p.m. on ESPN.

The learning specialist came back with good news.

"He tested in the genius level in matrix reasoning, which is puzzle-solving," Bortner says. "He can, you know, take things apart and look at them and put them back together. The psychologist who was testing him said she feels that's really part of the reason why he's so gifted in basketball. He can see the whole floor, put it all together in his mind and know where everybody's supposed to be."

Coaches teach players to think two passes ahead. Those who know Cooke's game say he thinks three passes ahead, sometimes more. Basketball isn't commonly regarded as an intellectual enterprise, but it's hard to deny that some candlepower is required to bring the ball up court, consider the individual skills of the two teammates on each wing, weigh them against the relative skills of the players shadowing on defense, adjust for fatigue or confidence or momentum or the directions of the nattering coach, factor in the score and the time on the clock, then -- all the while keeping your defender at bay -- make the decision that tells the brain to talk to the muscles in a way that allows them to route the ball to the right teammate at the right place at the right moment, so that player can then dish to another teammate, who can then complete the sequence with an assist to yet another teammate for the uncontested layup.

Try that, William F. Buckley. And do it on a dime.

But Cooke's talents have gone largely undeveloped in the classroom. He is 19 and still taking remedial classes. Twice, he has been held back from moving on to the next grade. So far, he has attended five high schools in five years while rising to the top of the nation's recruiting lists as a smooth yet powerful 6-foot-6 wing player who has already broken four glass backboards. He's gone to high school so long that he cannot play this year; his eligibility has expired.

	Cooke's High School Career
	Grade	School
	9	Franklin K. Lane (N.Y.), failed
	9	La Salle Academy (N.Y.)
	10	La Salle Academy (N.Y.), fall and spring terms
	10	Northern Valley, Demarest (N.J.), summer
	11	Northern Valley, Old Tappan (N.J.)
	12	Northern Valley, Demarest (N.J.)

Cooke is asked by a reporter to share his transcript. He defers to Bortner, who protectively, understandably recoils at the idea of displaying the bloody blisters on Cooke's academic career, his private Everest climb. Too much detail. She does say she has seen his writing. His favorite subject is English, one of the only academic areas in which he so far has satisfied the NCAA requirements to play college ball next year.

"It's all Ebonics," Bortner says. She is a blunt woman and has told Lenny many times she won't lie for him. "You know, half sentences, half words. It's like everybody knows what everybody is talking about, so what's the point?"

Cooke, though, knows the answer to that question all too well.

It's 11:30 a.m. on a wintry morning in Demarest, N.J., one of those upper-middle class suburbs of New York that draws much of its economic lifeblood from the city while simultaneously working hard to set itself apart from what the city represents. The park signs are painted in gold leaf, as if to announce that things out here are more conservative, more elite. The students at Northern Valley Regional High School are financially secure enough that they dress poor, in hooded sweatshirts the colors of dirt or moss, baggy jeans frayed at the bottom, and maybe a black ski cap.

Cooke, by contrast, looks like a million NBA bucks as he glides down the school hallway. Black leather jacket down to his thighs. Crisp, mint-condition Yankees cap pulled down to his eyebrows. Shiny new Nikes without a scuff. He stands out because of his style, and his height, and his race. There's not another black person among the dozens of students in the hallway. He moves through them like a quiet oil tanker through a busy harbor, bouncing off no one, connecting with no one.

But he's not in Demarest to make friends. His crew is in Brooklyn, where he returns almost every day after school. Cooke needs a high school diploma, one of three NCAA requirements to play college ball next year. And God willing, that is what he shall receive in June from Northern Valley Regional, two years after calling Bortner and requesting permission to come live with her in this community that is a vast demographic yawn from that of Bushwick. On the verge of failing out of his second New York City high school at the time, Cooke at the time considered Bortner, and Bergen County, his last hope.

At Northern Valley, 95 percent of students go to college and the average SAT score is 1,158. At Franklin K. Lane, Cooke's first high school, where three-fourths of the kids in school are eligible for free lunches, only 22 percent of students even bother to take the aptitude test and the average score is 775. One third of all students drop out before their senior year.

"Out here," Cooke says of suburban New Jersey, "people want to learn. In Brooklyn, it's like people do whatever they wanna do."

	A product of Brooklyn's squalored east side, Lenny Cooke, left, has dreams of changing the world, if only he can get to the NBA.

Cooke drives out to Bushwick, in the forgotten east end of Brooklyn. The west end is the Brooklyn that tourists know -- Flatbush Avenue, Junior's, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Botanical Garden, the tony brownstones of Park Slope. The east end is different. Bushwick is where the Jackie Robinson Expressway abruptly ends after winding through two boroughs, as though it finally ran out of hope. Hard against the last section of the highway are miles upon miles of weathered gravesites, listing tombstones and hulking mausoleums, packed so tightly it appears bodies are buried on top of bodies. The hills undulate with the dead.

Cooke lived a couple blocks from the cemetery, on what Bortner calls the worst block in the worst neighborhood in the borough. Cooke is not inclined to disagree. Before the building was condemned last year, Cooke lived with his mother and father, two younger brothers and little sister on the second story of a rickety, two-story wooden structure with large rats in the walls and larger holes in the floor. His mother made him pull a rug over one of the biggest holes and instructed guests to walk around it, lest they rain down on the prostitutes -- Cooke calls them "fiends" -- and addicts who lived below.

Alfreda Hendrix, whose maiden name was Cooke and named her first boy before marrying Vernon Hendrix, had pride. But pride did not buy Alfreda and Vernon much. It did not buy heaters, so they boiled water and opened the oven to keep the kids warm on frozen nights. It did not buy chandeliers, so the living room lighting consisted of a wire dangling from the ceiling with a bulb on the end. It certainly did not buy computers or many books, so Lenny did not read much.

Cooke glances up at the yellow building, now with boards covering the windows. "I'd ask my mother to help me if I had homework," he says. This was not too burdensome a request, given the class requirements. "Nine times out of 10, I didn't have homework."

He says school was more challenging in Atlantic City, N.J., where his mother was a blackjack dealer at the Trump Taj Mahal. He lived there through middle school, and on occasion, he insists, he made the honor roll. But that all unraveled when he moved to Bushwick. Alfreda and Vernon could not find work, and Lenny could not find the motivation to concentrate on school. Cooke was an American cliché in the making.

His freshman year at Franklin K. Lane, he allows, he got all F's and no-shows.

Cooke is asked what his school day was like back then. He grins. "Get on the train, joke around, go to school, stay in the gym for about three periods, probably go to English class, know what I'm saying?" He is just about to laugh now. "Roam the hallways, get chased by security guards. That's it."

The absurdity in Cooke's voice is such that for a moment, it's unclear whether he's implying that the joke is on him -- or if he's mocking the deep-set cultural notion that an education is the go-kart out of the ghetto. After all, the money men of the NBA have their eye on Lenny Cooke not because of the grade he received in Sequential Math but because, in the words of scouting guru Tom Konchalski, he "plays with the metabolism of a hummingbird," always moving, always jumping, always creating.

Lenny's draftability

If Lenny Cooke opts for the NBA, he's got a good chance of sneaking into the first round of the draft based on his potential alone. He's in a similar position to DeShawn Stevenson, who was drafted by the Utah Jazz late in the first round of 2000. Based on consultation with several NBA scouts, here's the skinny on his game. The Good: He's a phenomenal athlete, explosive scorer and fierce rebounder. Cooke's got a real knack for slashing to the basket and finishing in the open court. Think Jerry Stackhouse. The Bad: No jumper and shaky handle. Most of Cooke's points come from within 10 feet of the basket. He has virtually no three-point range and his mid-range jumper is streaky. His ball-handling skills are below average for a two-guard leading to costly turnovers. The Ugly: He doesn't always play hard and makes coaches work overtime to get him motivated. With a track record of questionable personal decisions and a poor work ethic in the classrom, his character could causes teams to take a pass on him. Chad Ford, ESPN Insider

Cooke's cell phone tweets.

"Yeah," Cooke grunts quietly, flipping up the phone's lid.

It's Joe "Jelly Bean" Bryant, father of Kobe Bryant and a former player with the Philadelphia 76ers. Cooke listens for a spell, says goodbye and shares the news: Jelly Bean wants Cooke to work out with Kobe when the NBA All-Star Game comes to Philly in a few weeks (he ends up visiting his mom, now in Virginia, instead). He says Jelly Bean's been talking to league general managers, who say they like Cooke's game.

Lenny's philosophy is that he will enter the draft when he feels assured he will be a lottery pick. Unfortunately for him, that time does not appear to be now. Although the success of Kobe -- a steal with the 13th pick in the 1996 draft -- suggests smaller players can be worth the gamble, the prevailing sentiment is that Cooke's game is still too raw. He has been in organized ball just four years, since a friend saw him toying around on a playground in a pair of hush puppies and brought him to an AAU coach.

Konchalski, who lives in Queens, has been watching Cooke since his sophomore year in high school, when he first made a name for himself on court. "He's got to work on his defense," he says. "He's got to work on his perimeter game and become a more consistent shooter." He also dribbles too much. In one gratuitous display before the scouts at the elite ABCD national summer camp last year, he bounced the ball between his legs eight times at the top of the key before elevating for a jumper.

Cooke will be eligible to play in the National Basketball Development League when he turns 20 in April, but he has no interest in the low-budget, off-Broadway production. So, ideally, it's off to college, which is a little like saying it's off to West Point for some dancer because she isn't ready for the New York City Ballet. It isn't the most logical of fallbacks, given his academic credentials and current focus in life, basketball.

He had planned to take the SAT in November, but decided he wasn't ready. He backed out again shortly before the January test date, intimidated by the SAT's emphasis on math and English skills. He and Bortner finally agree that instead he'll take the ACT, which measures aptitudes in a broader set of subject areas. He needs the ACT equivalent of at least an 820 SAT, the NCAA minimum for freshman eligibility, a score that would still put him near the bottom of the freshman class of which university he chooses.

Cooke is asked if he would be trying to go to college if not for basketball.

He shakes his head no.

Bortner clarifies, "Lenny wouldn't be going to high school if it wasn't for basketball."

This is the Great Contribution that industrialized sports makes to American life. As the theory goes, sport is the engine that can turn the lost into the literate, even the next generation of criminals into the next generation of citizens. It's a glorious ideal, this notion of the "student-athlete" that Americans desperately cling to and much of the rest of the world finds hopelessly awkward.

To a degree, Cooke is proof that the rest of the world is wrong. If not for basketball and Bortner, he says, "I'd be out selling drugs or something." But it's also true that if sport is the engine driving this train, academics is often no more than the caboose, a distant, obligatory tag-along on a journey it did not choose.

Cooke is learning this lesson the hard way.

To get him past ninth grade, Bortner helped Cooke transfer from Franklin K. Lane to the Catholic school where her son Brian was playing basketball, La Salle Academy. For a while, his grades improved. Then, as a sophomore, in his first year on the varsity, he began to make a name for himself on the court. Along the way, he skipped 57 days of school, by Bortner's count. When he did go to class, Cooke often just put his head down and slept. Bortner says she pleaded with the coach to bench him, to no avail. Cooke ended up leading La Salle deep into the city playoffs, without learning much in school.

That deficit became obvious later that year when he transferred to Demarest. Cooke says he didn't realize how far he had fallen behind, how much being a promising athlete had exempted him from a bonafide education, until he enrolled in summer school at the New Jersey school. The teachers expressed shock at his lack of preparedness for a 10th grader.

Cooke got used to being passed along. "I was just thinking that I was getting the grade because I knew the stuff," he says, "and I really didn't."

Bortner, the intimate observer, insists that Cooke must accept some responsibility for his academic shortcomings. But she is bothered that a learning disability in the language area was not discovered until a couple years ago when she hired her own specialist, the same expert who also found the matrix reasoning aptitude. "I think the educational system failed him for many years, I really do," she says.

	On the court, few players in the country can measure up with Lenny Cooke's potential.

Now the school system may get Lenny Cooke for only one more year, assuming he can meet the NCAA entrance standards. The allure of the NBA's penthouse life is so powerful, so distracting, so seemingly real in the era of one-and-out college careers, that Cooke often finds himself daydreaming in class of what the future soon may hold.

"I think about it every day," he says. "Like in a couple years, I could be a millionaire."

This type of mindset drives college coaches like Mike Jarvis slightly mad. The bald, bearded, African-American coach of St. John's University in Queens, whose stare alone could just about melt iron, fills with indignation over losing players early to the NBA.

Last year, it was freshman guard Omar Cook. The year before that, sophomore guard Erick Barkley. The year before that, sophomore guard Ron Artest.

"I'm really not that concerned about what the fans are missing," Jarvis says. "The tragedy is that we are missing out on educating and preparing a great, great group of very intelligent young men that could be really great role models and great influences on our society and make America a better place. So America is the one that's missing out."

The loss of Cook, who was second in the nation in assists on the Division I college circuit last season, was especially painful. "If I had known he was only going to be here for only a year, I would not have taken Omar Cook, to be honest with you," Jarvis said last November in a television interview.

Not that Jarvis is so outraged, of course, that he would actually refuse to participate in such a charade ever again.

It's January now, and Jarvis has a question for Lenny Cooke, who is sitting behind him at a St. John's game against West Virginia in Madison Square Garden.

"Get your grades yet?" Jarvis says, as he reaches out to shake Cooke's hand.

	Mike Jarvis would like to get Lenny Cooke on the court at St. John's, if only Cooke would show up in class at high school.

Cooke leans forward, nervous and eager to please.

"Three-point-oh," he says dramatically, as if delivering a present.

Jarvis is impassive. His unblinking stare penetrates to the back of Cooke's skull, suggesting, Don't mess with me, son.

Jarvis has a lot invested in Cooke, who has been getting free tickets to St. John's games for a couple of years. Where he presently sits with his Brooklyn friends, in VIP seats just behind the bench, six rows in front of former Red Storm coach Lou Carnesecca, he is virtually part of the team already. But to actually become part of the team next year, Cooke needs those NCAA minimum requirements for freshman eligibility, which means not only the requisite SAT or ACT score and a high school diploma, but also an acceptable GPA in specified core courses.

The 3.0 that Cooke speaks of, if accurate, is from his New Jersey school, where all but one of his classes is remedial. The NCAA does not accept remedial classes as core, or college preparatory, in nature. The organization wants a passing grade in 13 mainstream classes in the areas of math, English, the natural sciences, and the social sciences -- an average of barely three per year but still enough to suggest, in theory at least, that the student has some chance to succeed in college.

Cooke needs five more core classes, so with just a half a year to get eligible for college, he is enrolled in a second high school on weekends. It's a small, private high school in Queens that over the years has been popular with basketball players looking to get their core classes taken care of.

His New Jersey high school, Demarest, is strictly for diploma purposes. But there, more than at any school he has attended in New York, he is learning to learn. In those remedial classes, he works closely with teachers who specialize in at-risk students. At times, he appears to be gaining confidence. Teachers tell Bortner that Cooke, who arrived two summers ago in a flourish of street attitude, is now often the first to raise his hand to answer questions in class.

Cooke tells Bortner it's the first time in a long while that he hasn't felt dumb.

The educators express triumph. Bert Ammerman, the principal in Demarest, says the first partial victory was persuading Cooke, after some heated discussions, that he must come to class to earn a passing grade. The next, even less complete, was convincing Cooke that he is more than a basketball player.

	“	I've never seen a kid in kindergarten who is unhappy in school. But what happens between kindergarten and age 17? ... With Lenny, he ended up trying to put people off because he was afraid he couldn't do it in class. Basketball was the driving force for him to feed off. But there was no balance. We're trying to give him that balance. ”
		— Ben Ammerman, principal at Northern Valley Regional High School

"I've never seen a kid in kindergarten who is unhappy in school," Ammerman says. "But what happens between kindergarten and age 17? Well, for some kids, it's family problems, lots of things. With Lenny, he ended up trying to put people off because he was afraid he couldn't do it in class. Basketball was the driving force for him to feed off. But there was no balance. We're trying to give him that balance."

It's a mighty struggle, and Bortner shoulders the largest burden, which is OK with her because she considers her shoulders pretty big. She grew up five towns to the north of her current home, the tall, athletic daughter of a crane operator who for years brought three pizzas to the nuns in the convent every Friday night because he thought it was the right thing to do. She figures she has the money and time now that her husband sold his newspaper-insert printing business to Rupert Murdoch, so it's her obligation to make a home for Cooke -- and rouse him when he wants to sleep through class after staying out too late the night before in Brooklyn.

She distrusts his friends, and tells him so.

His friends say they're only trying to help the cause.

Cooke and several other boyhood friends are standing the intersection of Decatur and Irving, where Cooke talks of some day building a YMCA and theater.

"We hang out and all that but we tell him to stay in class," says Gavin Marchand, a short man with big eyes and an athletic gait.

"Like when he takes days off," says Damany Eastman, a thin fellow in an outrageous, black fur hat. A high-school dropout, he has no job. His future is being Lenny Cooke's friend. "He's like, 'Yo, I'm not going to school no more. And we're like, 'No, you can't take the day off. You go work!' "

Cooke takes their righteousness in stride, without emotion, but isn't sure how to respond. So, awkwardly, he reaches for the game, solid ground as always. Laughing but only half-joking, he says, "It ain't like they can beat me, so it don't matter! It don't matter."

Old habits die hard, and new influences come on strong. Virtually every new person in Cooke's suddenly significant life -- his current AAU coach, the shoe company execs, the college recruiters, the reporters -- gives at least lip service to the necessity of Cooke taking school seriously. And yet Cooke's value to each of those people derives specifically from his commitment to, and future in, basketball. Bortner, who enjoys the basketball scene but has no financial stake in his success, constantly reminds him, You can't give me anything that I don't already have!

Cooke is wise to this, so he listens. Sometimes.

A couple of months ago, Cooke visited his family in Virginia and spoke to his sister's elementary school. Word got back to Bortner from Lenny's mother that one of the messages Cooke imparted was, "Keep your eye on the pie in the sky." Bortner smiled. It's the phrase she uses when cajoling the best out of Lenny, who could easily believe he is already a success in life. His room is filled with the oversized trinkets of a young New York City basketball phenom, including two seven-foot tall Rucker League trophies, a pair of Slam magazine features about him displayed on each, and a thousand or so recruiting letters from colleges. The pile from the University of Iowa alone runs about 60 deep.

	“	He's famous. For what? What's he done? He's done nothing so far. ”
		— Debbie Bortner on Lenny Cooke

Cooke is asked what those stacks of letters suggest to him.

"That I'm doing good, something good," he says.

Coaches call constantly, begging Debbie to put Lenny on the line. In New York City, rappers want him at their parties. At traffic lights in New Jersey, children wave from cars. Cooke, from Bortner's Durango, nods back.

"He's famous. For what?" says Bortner, always the joykill. "What's he done? He's done nothing so far."

He is a man with nothing, on the verge of everything. Or a man with everything, on the verge of nothing. Much depends on how Cooke defines that pie in the sky.

Bortner likes to believe there is something even richer out there for Lenny Cooke than an NBA life. It has to do with the full development of a bright and talented teenager who must spend the next 60 or so years inside his mind and would benefit if the place is well-constructed. It has to do not just with forging a life worthy of being written about, but being the one to understand -- and articulate -- the truth of his existence.

She sees the author in him that, in his dreamier moments, he says he wants to be.

	On the verge of dropping out of his high school again, Cooke moved in with Debbie Bortner to get his grades in order to play college ball.

"He writes with such passion," she says, wistfully.

"The Life of Lenny Cooke," he says, when asked the title of his autobiography.

Simple as that. And simple as this: Basketball is making the necessary education to write such a book almost a nuisance, a trivial pursuit.

Shades of this story have been written too many times, involving too many young ballers, too many of them black, too many of them poor, too many of them from New York, too many of them who ended up with nothing but teen glory, for even Lenny Cooke to presume that a future in the NBA is assured. He knows what's at stake if he can't get into a college program, and, "it's a struggle because a lot of people is looking for me to fail," he says. He gets fired up.

Then he gets overwhelmed.

Earlier this week, late Tuesday night, Bortner returned home from a two-week trip to Thailand. The next morning, she walked into the room with the sky-blue walls that Cooke has called home the past two years, save for a brief period last fall when he got frustrated with school and left. When she woke him for school, Cooke delivered the news: He's moving to Detroit with Damany. They will stay with a new associate from the basketball world, a "personal trainer" whose name he would not disclose. He waved a plane ticket and said he was leaving Friday.

"Too many distractions here," he calmly told Bortner. "I need to do this."

What about high school, she implored. It's late in the eligibility game to drop out of yet another school.

"I'll go to school there," he told her. "I'll go to school."

With that, Lenny Cooke packed his shiny shoes in his bag and called a limo service. As the black Lincoln Town Car pulled out of her driveway, Bortner cried. She could not know for certain if Cooke was gone for good, but it sure felt like he was lost again.

Tom Farrey is a senior writer with ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com.

Since this story was originally published on March 1, Lenny Cooke has decided to forego his attempt to earn a college scholarship and recently made himself available for the upcoming NBA Draft. See related story