THREE-ACT PLAYER : As the Curtain Falls on His High School Career, Versatile Wayne Cook Prepares to Narrow His Role to Football at UCLA

Even as a scabby-kneed, towheaded 8-year-old, Wayne Cook knew where the action was. Sure, his dad was the football coach at Newbury Park High, but as far as Wayne was concerned, playing the game--any game--has always been better than watching it.

Wayne could have been a water boy, a sidekick or a caddy, shadowing older players and coaches and emulating their actions. Yet even as a youngster, Cook had the look of a leader and the arm of a quarterback, and it wasn’t long before he was tabbed as Newbury Park’s air apparent.

“He was always a squirrelly kid, always off behind the bleachers playing with a bunch of other kids,” said Buena Coach Rick Scott, who was Newbury Park’s offensive coordinator from 1978-83 before establishing one of Southern California’s most feared passing attacks at Hart the next four years. “He didn’t watch too many practices or games, he didn’t even seem interested. He’d always be over with the players’ little brothers playing tackle football.”

Scott, a close friend as well as associate of Newbury Park Coach Ken Cook, tried to convince Wayne that there was as much to learn from listening as there was from trial and error. In deference to his elders, Cook would stick around for a few moments, pretend to listen, then slip off to rejoin the pee-wee pick-up game.

“I remember when I was younger, way before high school, when Rick used to tell me to come out and throw with the quarterbacks,” Wayne Cook said. “He’d say, ‘Just listen to them, throw with them and try to pick up whatever you can.’ ”

A decade later--whether it was by osmosis, observation or plain hard work--Cook has parlayed his talent into the sweetest of deals: a Division I football scholarship.

At baseball practice Thursday, which also happened to be Cook’s 18th birthday, his teammates presented him with a chocolate cake trimmed in the Newbury Park school colors--black and gold. The icing read: “Happy Birthday, Golden Boy.”

“It’s a joke,” said Cook, a 6-foot-4, 180-pound senior who starts in center field. “Somebody called me that during the (Thousand Oaks) game the other day.”

Truth be told, it is no joke whatsoever. Cook has been pure gold at Newbury Park, where he has managed to have his cake and eat it, too.

As a kid, Cook never could make up his mind which sport he liked the best. At times, he was certain basketball was his future. When the weather was warmer, baseball seemed like a decent enough pursuit.

So what the heck, being as mercenary as the next guy, Cook decided to play it safe. If baseball taught him anything, it was that a player is more likely to hit a home run given three at-bats than he is in only one or two.

“I’ll tell you what, when I came into high school I figured that if you played three sports, you had three chances at a scholarship,” he said. “And I wanted to get a scholarship, I just didn’t know what it would be in.”

To some, football may have seemed Cook’s least likely route to college as his senior year began. As a junior first baseman, he had batted .337 and scored a team-high 28 runs. As a basketball player, he had led the team in rebounding as a sophomore and junior.

But in his junior season in football, the team was 1-8-1 and Cook spent the last half of the season nursing a sore left shoulder. When the season ended, he had arthroscopic surgery.

Yet his senior year started with considerably more success. Cook completed 16 of 29 passes for 141 yards and rushed for 62 yards in 10 carries in a season-opening 6-6 tie with Agoura. He seemed well on his way to fulfilling his weighty potential. What’s more, UCLA Coach Terry Donahue, by chance, attended the game--his daughter is a cheerleader at Agoura--and liked what he saw.

Maybe this Cook had something Bruin, Donahue thought.

“They were already sending me stuff,” Cook said. “But when Donahue came back from the game, he told his staff, ‘Hey, this Cook kid, get him going.’ They said, ‘We already are.’ ”

And the going was good. For about two more days. While practicing for the Panthers’ second game, a teammate fell on Cook’s right thumb, fracturing it near the wrist. Some question remains whether the terrible sound that rang out on the field that day was that of Cook’s hand, or heart, breaking.

“That was definitely one of my best games,” Cook said of the Agoura opener. “It was all coming together. That’s why getting hurt made me so mad. I think I could have passed for around 2,000 yards.”

Instead, he logged as many yards pacing the sidelines. Cook spent three weeks on the bench, hurried back too soon, and with his hand heavily taped, wasn’t nearly as effective. His fractious statistics were a shadow of what was expected. Cook finished the year with 1,197 yards and eight touchdowns in seven games. He completed 91 of 189 passes (48.1%), but was intercepted just three times.

“After the year I had, I was devastated,” he said. “I thought, ‘God, now I have to go to Moorpark and work my way up.’

“Schools are going to go on stats. They see the numbers and say, ‘This guy has great stats, let’s take a look.’ ”

UCLA, however, had given Cook a look-over during the summer, when he attended a Bruin-sponsored camp at UC Irvine for Southland high school players. Another Bruin scout attended Newbury Park’s season finale, a 21-14 win over Royal, a defeat that knocked the Highlanders out of the playoffs. Cook completed 10 of 13 passes for 127 yards, and the Bruins soon tendered a scholarship offer.

“Cook was great, he almost single-handedly did us in,” Royal Coach Gene Uebelhardt said. “We have a running joke about that game: It took a UCLA quarterback to keep us out of the playoffs. On that night in November, Newbury Park was the best team we’d seen all year.”

When Cook signed a letter of intent last winter, his family uttered a relieved “Whew.” For others, it was more along the lines of, “Who?.”

A few days after Cook signed, the Bruins landed two of the nation’s top quarterback recruits, both from the football-crazed Lone Star State.

Bert Emanuel (6-0, 185) passed for 1,186 yards and rushed for 612 last year at Langham Creek High in Houston. The Bruins also landed Tommy Maddox of L. D. Bell High in Bedford, Tex. As a senior, Maddox (6-4, 190) completed 170 of 221 passes for 1,889 yards and 15 touchdowns.

According to Super Prep magazine, a Costa Mesa-based publication that ranks players from across the United States, Maddox and Emanuel are among the top 13 quarterback prospects.

Maddox, whom Super Prep publisher Allen Wallace describes as “the classic drop-back passer,” was named Super Prep’s Southwest Player of the Year. Emanuel, Wallace says, pilots the option like a magician and has speed and talent comparable to USC-bound Hawthorne High standout Curtis Conway. Emanuel reportedly runs the 40-yard dash in 4.35 seconds.

And then there’s Cook, who became the first Newbury Park football player to receive a Division I scholarship in nine years.

“Cook, he’s their unknown guy,” said Wallace, who ranks UCLA’s quarterback crop second only to that of defending national champion Notre Dame.

And though statistics always fail to tell the whole story, in Cook’s case, they do reveal a few shortcomings.

“He’s a long way from being a college quarterback,” said Scott, who coached current Bruin quarterback Jim Bonds at Hart. “Newbury Park didn’t throw the ball a lot and he missed quite a few games. He’s going to be 300 throws behind those other all-star guys they signed.”

Cook figures he’ll be the low man on the depth chart, at least at first, but has accepted that role philosophically.

“You’ve got to be a little worried,” Cook said. “I initially thought, ‘I could be there and never get to play.’ Then I started thinking that (Maddox) made it, and he was on a good team. And pretty much everyone who has gotten picked has come from a good team. I’m on a crappy team and I still got a scholarship to UCLA.”

Wayne’s father, Ken, is a buy-American kind of guy. In the Cook family driveway are four Fords, including three 1960s-era Mustangs. As in their coach-player relationship, Ken does the automotive tinkering and Wayne handles the driving.

“He always tells me that I should learn how to fix the car myself,” Wayne said. “He says that someday, it’s going to cost me a lot of money.”

The 1988 Newbury Park team, by universal account, was a latter-day Edsel, especially in comparison to Ken Cook’s previous successes.

Ken, 48, retired as coach of the Panthers last January after a 14-year varsity career that included berths in the Southern Section playoffs seven times in nine years prior to his son’s tenure. The steady stream of talent that fueled the Panther football program had finally run dry.

For some, it was not a pretty sight, watching a prospect like Cook being chased from sideline to sideline and ceaselessly pounded. When Cook was able to get off a pass, as often as not, nobody pulled it in.

Mitch Ennis, the junior varsity baseball coach at Simi Valley and a teacher at Newbury Park, handled the sideline chains at Panther home games.

“I’d say they dropped six or seven balls a game,” he said of Newbury Park’s receivers. “Cook was laying them right in there and clank , they’d drop every other one.”

Ennis’ first cousin, Greg Ennis, started several games at quarterback for pass-happy Stanford in 1987, a team that has landed some of the best signal-callers in the nation. Mitch Ennis says there is no comparison between his cousin and Cook.

“No doubt, he’s got a better arm than Greg did in high school,” Ennis said. “Wayne Cook can throw short, he can throw long. He was dropping balls right on top of them. He just needed some help.”

Said Scott: “Jimmy (Bonds) had all the ingredients. He had linemen, he had a running game, he had good receivers. Wayne was practically naked, all by himself.”

Shane Jeffers, who was also a reserve on the basketball team, was one of Cook’s football targets.

“I probably dropped half of them,” said Jeffers, who is a close friend of Cook. “And every time I hung on, there’d be a penalty and it wouldn’t count.”

Yet Jeffers said the quarterback rarely exhibited a temper during games, despite numerous Panther miscues.

“When we’d drop one, he’d just tell us to concentrate and that we’d get them next time,” Jeffers said.

Said Cook: “I don’t think yelling at a player works. I never really yelled at my line, never really yelled at the receivers. If you get down on them, they get down on you and they don’t want to do their job as much.”

Cook, as usual, continued to do the job after the football season ended. As a forward and off-guard for the basketball team, he led Ventura County with an average of 22.3 points, and he also averaged a team-high 10.0 rebounds a game. It marked the third consecutive year Cook led the team in rebounding and he is fourth on the school career list with 536. He made 33 of 79 three-point attempts (42%) and 171 of 360 from two-point range (48%), despite ever-present double-teaming defenses designed to stop him.

Ken Barone, who has 28 years of coaching experience, including 21 at Newbury Park, calls Cook “the best all-around athlete I’ve ever had and one of the five or six best basketball players I’ve ever coached.”

In three years as a starter, Cook ranks in the school’s career top 10 in scoring (fifth), steals (fifth) and assists (eighth). Last season, the Panthers finished 13-11 overall and advanced to the Southern Section 4-A Division playoffs.

Cook’s basketball ability did little to hurt his scholarship chances. Scott, who referees basketball games during the winter, recalls seeing numerous football scouts in the stands at the Newbury Park basketball games he worked. Several used Scott as a sounding board.

“They’d flat-out ask me about his abilities,” Scott said. “I’d tell them to imagine him in the context of their offense and not the one at Newbury Park.”

And despite the recruiting process--which is at its frenetic worst during basketball season--Cook was named to three all-tournament teams and was Barone’s acknowledged floor leader.

“What stands out is his consistency,” Barone said. “And he was never really 100% after football.”

If Cook had nagging injuries after football, imagine his condition by the time baseball Coach Gary Fabricius got hold of him. Tattered or not, when Fabricius learned that Cook was considering skipping baseball this season to lift weights for football, he made Cook an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“I wanted him out here,” Fabricius said. “I was prepared to go to him with a contract that said, ‘Hit. Go lift. Get ready for football.’

“I just wanted his bat in the lineup. I would have DH’d him, anything to get him out here.”

Cook eventually agreed to play, and moved from first base to center field. Like Fabricius, Marmonte opponents know what it means to have Cook’s bat in the lineup.

Simi Valley Coach Mike Scyphers said that when the Pioneers faced Newbury Park last week, he called the pitches when Cook was at the plate.

“I normally call about five pitches all game, but I called the ones against him,” Scyphers said. “We feel Wayne Cook is a fastball hitter, and we wanted to be sure to give him the off-speed stuff.”

Alas, Cook can’t hit the curve. Scyphers, however, said he believes Cook might have been a major-college prospect had he devoted more time to baseball, which is a 12-month endeavor for most serious players in Southern California.

“I think he could definitely have had a (college) career,” Scyphers said. “But you have to follow your instincts, and he chose football. You have to admire him. Even with his energy being channeled in three directions, mediocrity never set in.”

There have been a few chinks in the armor, however. A recent 0-for-10 slump lowered Cook’s batting average to .310. But it is springtime, and for once, Cook is no longer expected to shoulder a disproportionate share of the load.

In fact, Newbury Park (14-2-3) has been dominant, playing 14 games without a loss before a 2-1 defeat to Camarillo on Friday. And Cook is merely playing a supporting role.

“What’s neat now is that we have a lot of guys hitting around him,” Fabricius said. “So he’s not being counted on to carry the team.”

Cook, of course, would prefer the limelight.

“I don’t know if I should say this, but I’m the kind of guy who thinks that nobody’s better,” he said. “I’m ticked off right now because I know I can do better.

“I want to be the No. 1 guy, the one with the eight homers and the average around .500.”

In a manner of speaking, factoring in his talents in football and basketball, he’s doing far better than that. It doesn’t take a stat whiz to tell you that even if he considers himself two for three, that’s an above-average average for an above-average guy.