Cancer Survivor Kenny Cook Trying to Capture NFL's Attention

Attracting attention from at least a dozen teams in advance of the 2015 NFL draft, Gardner-Webb wide receiver Kenny Cook has come a long way in the past eight years.

During the summer of 2007, before Cook’s sophomore year of high school, he woke up one morning with swelling in his neck. Cook’s mother, Kimberly, took Kenny to the hospital, where scans revealed that Cook had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system that compromises the body’s ability to fight infections.

Cook immediately began undergoing radiation treatments, which were followed by chemotherapy.

“All my hair fell out,” Cook recalled in an interview with Bleacher Report this past week.

The cancer diagnosis put a promising high school football career on hold and forced Cook to miss his entire sophomore season. That said, he was able to recover quickly to return to his other high school sport—basketball—by January.

Cook credited his faith, as well as the support of his family and friends, for enabling him to overcome his illness.

“God held me in his hands the entire time, and my family and friends kept positive and told me I was going to come back at a better level,” Cook said.

Kimberly Cook, who raised Kenny and his brother as a single mother, stayed by Kenny’s side throughout his bout with cancer. Between the two of them, however, Kenny was often the one who was stronger emotionally, she told Bleacher Report.

“Not one time did I see him shed one tear,” Kimberly Cook said of her son’s strength during his cancer battle. “I used to just get weak, and Kenny was like ‘Mom, don’t cry. I’m going to be OK.’ ”

Since his recovery, Kenny Cook has been healthy and able to thrive athletically. Both a wide receiver and a defensive back at Clinton (South Carolina) High School, he had nine interceptions in his junior football season. As a senior in 2009, Cook earned the Laurens County Touchdown Club Player of the Year award after recording another eight interceptions while also catching 29 passes for 597 yards and two touchdowns.

Getting back into top shape after having cancer was hard.

“It was really tough,” he said. “I had to do a lot of running and lifting on my own just to get back to the level that I wanted to play at.”

In addition to challenging him physically, Cook’s cancer diagnosis was a setback in his pursuit of playing major college football. As a result of the time he missed on the field and in school, Cook had to spend two years at Garden City Community College, including one redshirt year, before enrolling at Gardner-Webb University, an FCS school in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where he played from 2012 to 2014.

Ultimately, though, he feels that the adversity he has overcome has made him stronger as an athlete and person.

“I know how it feels now to have the game taken away from you, and that’s why I play so hard now because you never know when it’s going to be your last play,” Cook said. “You can’t take anything for granted.

“I know it sounds cliche about don’t take anything for granted, but I actually know what it means to wake up one morning and be told that you can’t play sports anymore,” Cook added. “You never know if you’re going to be the same again.”

From Junior College to the FCS: Cook’s College Football Career

Despite being more highly touted as a defensive back coming out of high school—he was chosen to play that position in the 2009 South Carolina North-South All-Star Football Game—Cook became a full-time wide receiver when he started his career at Garden City.

Jeff Tatum, who coached Cook during his playing season at Garden City in 2011 and is now the head coach at Mississippi Delta Community College, said he thought Cook’s build and personality would make him “a really, really good wide receiver.”

“He’s got the calmness that you like in a wide receiver. He’s got the aggressiveness that you like to go over the middle and make the catch...but he’s not a guy that’s a big hitter,” Tatum told Bleacher Report. “And some guys just run forward better than they run backward.”

Cook started to show his potential as a wide receiver during that 2011 season, when he led the Garden City Broncbusters with 26 receptions for 325 yards and a touchdown and was an honorable mention selection for the all-Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference.

“He’s one of those guys who were going to stay after practice and run routes,” Tatum said. “He never was satisfied with where he was as far as a player; he was always looking to get better every single time out there on the field.”

At Gardner-Webb, Cook immediately started to blossom in 2012, when he caught 48 passes for 666 yards and seven touchdowns to lead the team in all three categories. He earned second-team All-Big South Conference recognition for his efforts.

In 2013, Cook led the Big South Conference in all three of those categories, with 76 receptions for 1,008 yards and nine touchdowns. As a senior this past season, he led the Big South Conference in receptions (64) once again and had 758 receiving yards and five touchdowns, earning first-team All-Big South honors for a second consecutive year.

Carroll McCray, who has been Gardner-Webb’s head coach since 2013, believes Cook’s progress has happened because he “does the little things very well.”

“He’s a tireless worker,” McCray said. “I think he’s really worked hard to become a better route-runner. I think he’s worked really hard on his speed, knowing that that was something that he would need to improve if he was going to have an opportunity at the next level. And I think he’s really worked on some deficiencies from the time we arrived to the last two seasons that are very evident when you put him out there and he can make a play.”

La’Donte Harris, who worked with Cook the past two seasons as Gardner-Webb’s wide receivers and tight ends coach, also pointed directly to Cook’s work ethic as a reason for his success.

“Being a guy that’s had to overcome a lot of adversity in his life as a young man, I think that just motivated him to work harder,” Harris told Bleacher Report. “Kenny comes out like he’s always trying to get extra work, he’s always staying later, always up here trying to watch film to get better, and I think it’s just because he has a personal goal: He wants to hear his name get called on draft day.”

Whether Cook actually will be among this year’s 256 draft selections remains uncertain. Nonetheless, he believes that his time at Gardner-Webb has played an integral role in preparing him for his shot at the next level.

“We kind of ran like a pro-style offense, and my coaches, they didn’t slack on anything,” Cook said. “They told me if I wanted to be great, I wanted to be able to play at the next level that I had to come out and practice hard and prove it.”

Starting to Make a Name for Himself

Hundreds of prospects in the 2015 draft class—including many who really should not be worthy of selections—have more notoriety and name recognition than Cook. He has only received fractional exposure in comparison to prospects from FBS schools, and he was not invited to the 2015 NFL Scouting Combine.

Regardless, Cook has garnered attention from NFL scouts leading up to the draft, which Harris said is not by accident.

“If you do what you’re supposed to do, take care of business and you go out there and perform, you’re going to be seen regardless of where you’re at,” Harris said. “It don’t matter where you at, they’ll find you; that’s their job.”

According to Harris, roughly 20 to 25 scouts made their way to Gardner-Webb this season to get a closer look at Cook.

Additionally, he has had and will have a number of opportunities to impress scouts in the months between the end of his senior season and the draft, which begins April 30.

In early January, Cook participated in the Medal of Honor Bowl, an all-star game for draft hopefuls held in Charleston, South Carolina. While that game does not carry the same prestige as the Senior Bowl or the East-West Shrine Game, it was still widely attended by NFL scouts this year and provided an opportunity for its participants, including Cook, to showcase their skills in both practice and game settings.

“The game really helped me out because I just know that I can play with those guys and play on that level, that same level they have been,” Cook said. “My size kind of stood out because I was like one of the biggest receivers there. As the days kept going on, I just kept seeing that I really could stack up with those guys.”

Cook’s next opportunity to showcase his skills came at Gardner-Webb’s pro day, which was attended by representatives from nine NFL teams: the Buffalo Bills, Carolina Panthers, Cleveland Browns, Denver Broncos, Jacksonville Jaguars, Kansas City Chiefs, New York Giants, Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans.

According to NFL.com’s Gil Brandt, Cook weighed in 6’3 ⅜” and 208 pounds, with 10 ⅜” hands and 34 ½” arms, all measurables that make him one of the largest wide receivers in this year’s draft class.

Per Brandt, Cook ran the 40-yard dash in 4.58 and 4.62 seconds, while he also had a 32.5” vertical jump, 10’0" broad jump, 4.53-second 20-yard shuttle and 7.44-second three-cone drill. He also put up 12 repetitions of 225 pounds on the bench press.

Those numbers are not considered bad for a wide receiver of Cook’s size, but he is not satisfied with his performance.

“It was really cold—28 degrees, I think—and it was wet,” Cook said. “So I think I did pretty good for those elements. I could have put up a lot better numbers in a different situation.”

Because of that, he will be taking the field for a second pro-day workout Monday at North Carolina State University, which should give him an opportunity to showcase his skills in front of even more scouts.

Cook said he has also scheduled private workouts with three NFL teams—the New England Patriots, Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers—which might be the strongest indicator that at least some scouts in the league believe he is a draftable prospect.

Will Cook Be Drafted?

Ranked by NFLDraftScout.com as the No. 465 overall prospect in this year’s draft class, Cook appears to be fighting an uphill battle to be drafted and/or make an NFL roster. But that’s not going to stop Cook, who has already won a major battle already in his life, from giving his all toward making his NFL dream come true.

“I’m just going out there with a chip on my shoulder,” he said.

Cook, who listed Calvin Johnson, Brandon Marshall and Alshon Jeffery as three of his favorite wide receivers to watch in the NFL, knows that his great size might be his biggest asset.

“My big frame and my size and my hands, I’ve got huge hands, and I can go up and attack the ball,” Cook said.

His former coaches—McCray, Harris and Tatum—all agree.

“His biggest strength is his physical size,” Harris said. “I think what impressed a lot of scouts when they came out here and watched him in his pro day was how well he runs. Nobody thinks a big guy his size can run, but he can pick them up and put them down pretty well.”

All three of those coaches also cited Cook’s determination and character as additional reasons that NFL teams should consider drafting him.

“Anything I asked him to do, he’s very, very coachable,” Tatum said. “Anything that you ask him to do, he’ll try. Whether he believes in it or not, he’s going to give it a shot, work at it, to do exactly what you wanted.

“He’s real personable. He’s not one of the guys who's going to say a lot in a group setting...but he’s very, very talkative and very, very personable when it’s a one-on-one situation.”

McCray said that off the field, Cook “doesn’t have a blemish on his record.”

“Just because of who he is in the classroom, off the field and how he plays on the field, he demands respect from everybody around him,” McCray said. “He doesn’t ask for it, he’s a very humble young man, but just the way he carries himself and does everything right...the kids respect him very highly for that.”

There are still some areas in Cook’s game that he will need to continue to work on, Harris said.

“I think he needs to use his hands a little bit more coming off the line versus man coverage and press coverage; I think that’s his biggest weakness,” Harris said. “Getting in and out of cuts, he’s not a very agile guy...so agility and using his hands, those are his probably biggest two things (he needs to work on), but everything else... He has great body control, he’s a decent route-runner, and he knows how to use his body in certain situations.”

FootballGameplan.com’s Emory Hunt, an NFL draft analyst who regularly evaluates small-school players, believes that Cook’s best fit in the NFL “would be as an inside ‘F’ wide receiver, or similar to the way the (New Orleans) Saints use Marques Colston.”

“I think the best quality of Kenny's game is his ability to play above the rim both inside the hashes and outside the numbers,” Hunt told Bleacher Report.

Tatum compared Cook to Corey Washington, a 6’4”, 214-pound wide receiver he coached during his time as the offensive coordinator at Georgia Military College. Washington went undrafted out of Newberry College last year but ended up making the New York Giants after catching four consecutive game-winning touchdown passes in the preseason.

Hunt believes Cook is worthy of a draft selection this year, and although he is uncertain of whether that will actually happen, he expects to see Cook make plays in the league.

“If I had a pick, I'd definitely draft him...but the league is fickle, so who knows if he ends up getting drafted,” Hunt said. “But he'll definitely make an NFL roster and contribute.”

To Cook, being drafted would be the realization of “a lifelong dream.”

“Growing up as a kid, you always want to get drafted, so it would be a surreal moment,” Cook said.

More important to Cook than whether or not he gets drafted, however, is simply that he gets a chance to prove himself.

“As a rookie, you just want to make a roster, that’s the main thing,” he said. “I just want to just come in and play hard and work hard and just show everybody that you actually can make it from a small school.”

All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Dan Hope is an NFL/NFL Draft Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report.

Follow @Dan_Hope