MADISON, WIS. ? Today is Norm Cook’s 47th birthday. Sadly, I don’t think there will be any ice cream and cake. No presents, either. No celebration at all.

Cook is a former Kansas University basketball standout, a 6-foot-9 freshman forward on the Jayhawks’ 1974 NCAA Final Four team who was a first-round draft choice of the Boston Celtics two years later.

Cook’s 21-year-old son, Brian, is the starting center on the Illinois team that will face KU on Friday in the NCAA Midwest Regional. And as you may know, Cook has never seen his boy play.

Norm Cook suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He lives in a small two-bedroom house in his hometown of Lincoln, Ill., subsisting on the dole or an NBA pension or both. Duncan Reid isn’t sure. All Reid knows is Cook doesn’t recognize him.

Reid coached Cook in high school back in the early ’70s, then brought the thin and talented youngster with him to Mount Oread when he was hired as a KU assistant coach in 1973.

“I don’t know what triggered his mental illness,” Reid told me by phone from his home in Rock Island, Ill. “I don’t know when it started. I saw no sign of it at KU.”

Nearly a year ago, two of Reid’s best high school teams gathered for a reunion in Lincoln. Cook didn’t come, of course, but a couple of the players and Reid decided to give it their best shot and go to his house.

“When we got there, he was sitting in the living room looking at the wall,” Reid said. “He wasn’t looking at a TV, just the wall. I said, ‘Norman, it’s coach Reid.’ And he said, ‘You’re not coach Reid. There aren’t any basketballs here.’

“Well, it was no sense arguing with him, so we went away.”

Many people who suffer from Cook’s mental illness live normal  or close to it  lives by taking medication.

“When he’s on medication, he’s lucid,” Reid said, “but he doesn’t take it. So he gets arrested for scaring people. Most of the time he just walks the streets and scares people, but he doesn’t hurt them. He’s been arrested at least 50 times.”

Sometimes, Reid says, Cook has to be taken to a state hospital in Springfield, but mostly he lives in that two-bedroom house alone with his fears, lost probably forever to his family and friends. Cook’s wife Joyce divorced him in 1986.

Brian Cook resembles his father facially, but is bulkier at 6-10 and 240 pounds. Norm never weighed more than 215 pounds while in college. Other differences exist, too.

“Norm was stronger than Brian,” Reid said, “and may have been tougher. Brian’s larger and probably a better distance shooter.”

Norm Cook averaged 14.8 points and 7.9 rebounds during his junior season at Kansas. Brian Cook’s junior year to date shows corresponding numbers of 13.5 and 6.6. Pretty close.

“Yes,” Reid told me, “but in their prime Norm was better.”

If you’re wondering what Reid is up to these days, he turned 65 and retired from coaching at Rock Island High last spring. He’s staying busy by penning a weekly column in the city newspaper called “The Old Coach Says,” and he works part-time as an outreach officer for a local bank.

Other than that, he and his wife Sandy are kept on their toes by the 10 grandchildren produced by their three sons  Steve, Mike and Bill. Steve and Mike played basketball at Purdue and Colorado, respectively. In fact, Steve, who works in West Lafayette, Ind., is the analyst on Purdue’s radio network.

“We are,” Reid said, “very blessed.”

Would that we could say the same about Norm Cook, but life isn’t always fair. For example, another starter on that ’74 Kansas Final Four team, Danny Knight, died of a brain aneurysm less than three years later. Knight was only 24 years old.

Still, Cook and Knight played on the same team with two men who went on to become doctors  Cris Barnthouse, who has been a team physician of the Kansas City Chiefs for several years, and Ken Koenigs, who practices medicine in Springfield, Mass.

What a great story it would have made last year and again this year to hear Norm Cook talk about his son playing against his alma mater in the NCAA Tournament. He could have reminisced about his experiences in the Final Four and busted his buttons telling every writer and broadcaster who asked how proud he was of his son.

But it’s a story that will never be told.