Cook’s understanding of people began long before boxing.
Raised by his grandparents in Jamaica until he joined his parents in London at the age of nine, his grandmother ran the household with warmth and discipline, instilling responsibility and kindness.
“She taught us manners and respect,” he wrote in his autobiography Guardian of the Streets, often reminding him money meant little compared with how you treated others.
It was this ethos than ran through his approach to youth work, most notably at the Pedro Club – a youth club in Hackney that he saved from closure in 2003.
The club had been part of Hackney since 1929, sitting between three major housing estates on what became known as “Murder Mile”.
To Cook, who had grown up on a tough council estate in London when he moved from Jamaica, closing it “didn’t make sense” as “there was nothing else for kids to do”.
He understood the pressures facing young people — absent role models, distorted ideas of success, the pull of street life.
His response was not lectures, but structure, honesty and consistency – delivered through the opportunity to play sport, make music and learn life skills and underpinned by the discipline and respect learned in his boxing.
He insisted on good manners – and language to match, once revealing he told anyone using bad language they would have to get in the ring with him.
His work was praised by police in an article in the Independent, external in 2007 for “helping us to cut down crime and making our streets safer” and that Cook was “doing a fantastic job with youngsters who are hardest to reach”.
Cook would often stand at the top of the stairs of the youth club – a towering presence at 6ft 2ins – watching the street, greeting people and calling out to anyone who lingered too long outside.
“He was like a king on his throne,” recalled Natasha Patterson. “Always there. Always watching over things.”
Patterson used to walk past the Pedro and Cook would shout that the club needed volunteers. At first she didn’t go in but eventually she listened.
She started small — helping in the kitchen, supporting youth activities — before Cook nudged her towards boxing coaching, even when she doubted herself.
Over time, she earned her badges, travelled the country alongside him delivering talks about the club, and became Pedro’s head boxing coach.
“He was the first man I ever met who truly believed in me,” she said. “He made me feel like I could do anything.”
Cook often had to put his own money into the club or fundraise and faced regular battles to save the club from closing down to keep alive his mission to keep kids off the street.
“That saying of it takes a village to raise a child – well, this is the Pedro Club – a beacon and a village,” the club’s chairman and former British and European heavyweight champion Derek Williams told BBC Sport.
