BROTHER KNOWS BEST : Toi Cook’s Experiences as a Multisport Athlete Persuade Keyaan to Concentrate on Baseball at Montclair Prep

The footprints of an older brother can be a difficult path to follow, particularly when the alternative is branching off along one’s own trail.

As Robert Frost writes in “The Road Not Taken”:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

Keyaan Cook, 18, has seen his older brother, Toi, 24, successfully navigate that crossroads in choosing football over baseball after successful careers in both at Stanford. Keyaan, however, is of the opinion that he must decide between the sports as he approaches his senior year of high school.

Judging from his brother’s experiences, Keyaan believes that, although he, too, has major-college talent in football and baseball, he cannot afford to play both.

“At first I felt it was good to play two sports. (Then) the draft came up and that was hard on my whole family,” Keyaan said, referring to the fact that Toi was not selected until the eighth round of the NFL draft and the 38th round in Major League Baseball selections.

Playing two sports “kind of hurt my brother,” Keyaan said. “It really hurt my whole family that he got drafted so low in football and baseball. You can’t really tell how much better he’d be playing one sport.”

Toi, as well, recognizes the toll two sports takes.

“A lot of football teams were afraid to draft me because of baseball,” he said. “In baseball, I should have gone in the first five (rounds).”

On his brother’s advice, Keyaan has decided to bypass his third year as a starter for the Montclair Prep football team. Unlike Toi, who chose football and now plays for the New Orleans Saints, Keyaan has opted for baseball. This fall he plans to play for the Cubs, a semipro baseball team composed of top high school players in the Valley area.

“I told Keyaan, ‘Look, if I was you, I’d concentrate on baseball,’ ” Toi said. “With his ability, it’s more clear-cut what he should do. . . . He’s got incredible balance. I could see him in the Show. I think he could be a Buddy Bell or Bob Horner type. He has incredibly quick hands. You rarely see anybody blow a fastball by him.”

. . . Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear . . .

The decision to concentrate solely on baseball marks Keyaan’s first major departure from the path his brother traveled. Keyaan was always around his brother’s Montclair Prep teams as batboy, water boy and all-around gofer. He followed Toi to the school’s Van Nuys campus without hesitation.

Toi had headed north to Stanford a year before Keyaan enrolled at Montclair Prep as a seventh-grader, and Toi’s academic and athletic exploits were still fresh in the minds of students and teachers. The weight of a brother’s reputation was a heavy burden for a 12-year-old to bear.

“At that time . . . I wanted to switch schools,” Keyaan said. “Probably the reason I didn’t like Montclair was because of being Toi’s brother and not doing well with grades, and teachers would say, ‘Oh, Toi was such a good student in my class.’ When teachers would do that, I’d really take that pretty hard.”

Said Toi: “That’s when I think he resented being my brother.”

Not realizing that other high schools were courting Keyaan for his baseball talent, some Montclair Prep athletes thought Keyaan was merely a wanna-be.

“I was pretty upset about what was going on,” Keyaan said. “I don’t wear Stanford stuff or even Saints stuff now because certain people, when they see me, think I’m riding my brother’s jock.”

Keyaan didn’t get an opportunity to prove himself until he broke into the baseball lineup as a freshman and hit .389 on a senior-dominated team. The next two years, he improved his average to .487 and then .500. He also spent two seasons as the Mounties’ starting quarterback.

Keyaan (5-foot-10, 220 pounds) is deceptively agile for his size, but Toi said that his brother should shed some weight before he moves to the next level of baseball. Montclair Prep football Coach George Giannini said he sees the chunky Keyaan as an outside linebacker.

“Keyaan is a great athlete,” said Giannini, who also coached Toi (5-11, 188). “He doesn’t look like his brother, but he has athletic feet and an athletic mind. . . . I would say their athletic style is different. Toi was more of a long, graceful athlete, whereas Keyaan is a much quicker, direct athlete.”

Giannini noted that Keyaan gets more interest from college football recruiters than did Toi, but Keyaan, who completed 53 of 117 passes for 638 yards and two touchdowns while throwing nine interceptions last season, appears set in his decision to forgo football.

. . . Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back . . .

While others tend to view one brother in the light of the other, Toi and Keyaan are far enough apart in age to have never competed in anything more serious than back-yard Wiffle Ball.

“It’s just always been a very special relationship,” said Sandi Cook, the boys’ mother. “On all the applications Keyaan gets for schools they ask him who he most admires, and he’s always listed Toi.”

In his role as older brother, Toi acts as mentor, friend and part-time batting coach to Keyaan.

“I know he definitely listens to my parents, but when something bothers him, he calls me,” Toi said. “Just talking to him, I think he’s very level-headed. I try to give him little things. We talk about girls and not drinking and driving and all that stuff.

“Every time I talk to him, he always gets a hit, and I always tell my parents, ‘The hitting guru is back.’ ”

The entire Cook family would like to see Keyaan follow in his brother’s footsteps to Stanford. As did Toi, Keyaan has gradually lifted his grade-point average throughout his years at Montclair Prep. Keyaan now hopes to score well enough on the Scholastic Aptitude Test to be recruited by Stanford baseball Coach Mark Marquess.

“That would be wonderful,” Sandi Cook said of the possibility of having two sons attend Stanford. “That would be a dream come true.”

School means more than just a name on an athletic uniform to the Cooks. When Toi was in grade school, Greg and Sandi Cook left Chicago because he spent too much time riding the bus to parochial school.

Now living in Canoga Park, they opted to send both boys to Montclair Prep, although the tuition, $6,000 this year, is steep.

“It’s expensive, but in the long run it’s paid off because of the kind of things that have happened for Toi,” said Greg, a cameraman for a major motion picture company. “It’s just a better way.”

The Cooks’ emphasis on education, combined with their sons’ prodigious athletic talent, has produced a pair of sons so well-rounded that they practically bounce. Toi has chosen one path to fulfillment; Keyaan hopes to follow another.

. . . Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.