Winston Brooks: Lawman

COEUR d'ALENE - Now that Winston Brooks is back, you might recognize him.

If he pulls you over, it's all right to tell Coeur d'Alene's new police officer you've seen his face somewhere while you fish for your license.

"I get that a lot," Winston said. "They say, 'Hey, don't I know you?'"

It's probably from TV, or the sports pages.

Gonzaga University basketball fans probably still remember the 96-95 loss to the University of Arizona during the second round of the 2003 NCAA tournament, the first double-overtime thriller in bracket play.

"Just imagine if we would have won," Winston joked, the point guard on that star-studded team. "I tell them I'm just like everybody else."

But that was then and this is now, and Winston, 31, has come back to Coeur d'Alene to change his life all over again - just as he did as a young man fleeing the projects of Richmond, Va., for a chance to straighten out his trouble-plagued life.

"North Idaho truly made me understand what family is like," said Winston, who transferred from a Texas junior college to play point for North Idaho College in 2000. "I like coming back here."

And he'll be around for a while, too.

Winston was hired by the Coeur d'Alene Police Department on Sept. 1. Having completed POST Academy and finishing his field training, Winston should be on full-time patrol at the end of March.

"It's hard to believe it now that I'm a police officer, but I used to get in trouble," he said. "But if I can help one person change, then I've done my job."

It was in Richmond where Winston ran with the wrong crowds while his single mother worked multiple jobs to feed the family. It was in the projects he was conditioned to mistrust people and chose confrontation over communication, decisions that landed him in juvenile corrections.

"I'm not afraid to say that, because I like speaking to people about it," Winston said. "So when kids come up to me and say, 'You have no idea. You don't know what I'm going though,' I say, 'Oh Buddy, yes I do.'"

But it was in the projects, too, Winston learned basketball, and all the skills the good ones take from it: Problem solving, anticipation, seeing moves moments before they happen and striking on those breaks with lightning quick discipline, dribbles, cross-overs and drives.

Skills that brought him to North Idaho College as a transfer, then to Gonzaga and the Dance.

Skills that made him his family's first college graduate, with a chance at a master's degree. They gave him a professional basketball stint in Germany, and allowed him to buy a house he now shares with his wife and daughter in Spokane, and helped him move his family to Spokane, too.

But it was under the watch of former NIC head basketball coach Hugh Watson and trainer Randy Boswell, among others, that the kid who grew up playing ball on milk crates stuck to fence posts, learned the communication and discipline to succeed anywhere, becoming an all-conference player along the way.

"It's good to see good things happen to good people," Boswell told Winston Tuesday during the NIC boosters lunch, where Winston was introduced as a new officer. "And you're one of them. We need you here."

"They took a raggedy old athlete and turned me into what I am today," Winston said of the Cardinal staff.

And now he wants to pass those lessons on.

Besides his new job on patrol, Winston coaches AAU teams and the Gonzaga Prep High School girls team, and works with kids in juvenile corrections.

He was working at a detention center in Spokane when the Coeur d'Alene Police Department hired him from 90-some applicants, and he still takes his basketball teams to visit the kids at the center - "to teach them not to take anything for granted," he said.

He almost never made it West. An AAU coach had to drag him away from his troubled life.

Winston's mother was working, his brothers were around somewhere, when the coach showed up at his door a dozen years ago.

"You got a talent," the coach told Winston. "You're going to use it."

"I'm fine just being here at home." Winston said.

"No," the coach said. "You're going to get out of here."

The coach took Winston to the airport to play ball in Kansas, eventually Texas and finally Coeur d'Alene.

"There are so many things I want to do here and in Spokane," Winston said about his new field. "But a lot of it always starts with the kids."

So if you see him on patrol, it's OK to say you recognize him.

After all, some sports reports call the double overtime thriller loaded with future professional players on both rosters one of the best college basketball games ever played.

"Those ever-lovin' Zags almost did it again," one Sports Illustrated piece on the near upset reads, describing the game blow by blow before detailing how the Bulldogs ran out of offensive punch when soon-to-be pro Ronny Turiaf, and, yes, Winston Brooks, fouled out.

"Yeah," Winston said, laughing about it now. "People are coming up to me saying, 'Hey that's Winston Brooks.'

"And that's a good thing," he said. "Especially when it's for the right reasons."