PROVIDENCE — The first time I met Ed Cooley, then a senior at Central High School and one of the top schoolboy basketball players in the state, was in the sports department of the Providence Journal.
It was somewhere in the 1980s, and he said he had come down to help Paul Kenyon, then the Journal’s schoolboy sports writer, to pick the All-State team.
Say what?
No matter that no one had ever done that before.
No matter that no one has done that since.
That was vintage Cooley, even if no one knew that then.