June 26, 2002. Cooke waited anxiously at a Manhattan hotel, expecting his name to be called in the lower part of the first round or early in the second. Yao Ming was the first pick that night, going to Houston. Stoudemire, one of Cooke’s main rivals in his grade, went ninth to Phoenix, also out of high school. The night dragged on. Players Cooke had never heard of — some from countries he had never heard of — were selected, 58 in all.

“I waited, I waited, I waited,” he said. “Like on Christmas Day, you think you’re getting this toy, and then Christmas comes, it’s not under the tree. It breaks you down emotionally. I broke down, realized I got bad advice. But you wonder, why not? Why didn’t my name get called?”

No longer a commodity, no longer surrounded by those seeking to cash in on an prospective fortune, Cooke was soon looking for new representation and a place to play. He tried the new N.B.A. developmental vehicle, known as the D-League, but carried a star’s sense of entitlement. Or maybe it was a case of not enough desire. In one of Shopkorn’s many recorded scenes, Cooke responded to a request for a 6:30 a.m. training session at a camp with incredulity, wondering why the start time couldn’t be changed to 8.

He didn’t last long in the D-League and landed in the old United States Basketball League the next spring. He scored 47 points one night for the Brooklyn Kings, with the original Brooklyn King — the Knicks legend named Bernard — watching from courtside, intrigued by what he saw while pointing out the schoolyard tendencies that haunted Cooke’s game.

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.