Craig Robinson has always been there for his brother-in-law, Barack Obama

CORVALLIS, Ore. - The big, bald man is standing at center court, arms crossed and eyes alive, his attention riveted on the 10 orange-and-black clad ballplayers before him. It is a few minutes after 7 a.m. in Gill Coliseum, home of the Oregon State Beavers, a team with a proud past that has become a basketball laughingstock. It is what happens when you finish the previous season 6-25 and go winless in the Pac 10 (0-18) and you've had one winning season in the last 18, or since Bush the Elder left office.


Craig Robinson, the new OSU coach, isn't interested in last year. He is interested in now, and in change, a theme that courses through his family as if it were in the bloodstream. He is teaching his players to be punctual (that means arriving at 5:10 a.m. every day) and committed and to get better every single one of those days, and at the moment he's liking what he's seeing, the players cutting hard, the ball zipping around the court, a facsimile of the Princeton offense Robinson learned under Pete Carril, a quarter-century ago, coming to life.


"Good. It's starting to look like something now," Craig Robinson says. He strolls toward the sideline and leans his beefy, 6-6 frame against the scorer's table, his size 15 feet splayed wide, the historic and unfathomable whirl of the week's events still running through his mind in an endless, joyous loop.


Not even three days before, 46-year-old Craig Robinson was on a different basketball court, not coaching, but playing. The court was in a gym on Chicago's West Side, a place called Attack Athletics. It was Tuesday afternoon, and from 3 o'clock until 5:15, Robinson and his brother-in-law, Barack Obama, and assorted others played pickup basketball, even as millions of Americans were casting their ballots, midway through the most significant election day in the annals of the republic.


Obama got a good sweat going. He shoots left and shoots well, and has a deep understanding of the game - something Robinson found out early on, when he "vetted" Obama on the court during his courtship of Michelle, getting a feel for the kind of man and player he was, and coming away impressed.

Everybody made sure there were no competitive excesses during the run.

"I didn't want to accidentally elbow Barack in the eye, or have him come out there with a busted lip," Robinson says. He smiles and shakes his head, and takes himself back again to Tuesday night, when Craig Robinson was the only basketball coach in America on stage at Grant Park, when the Harvard man his kid sister brought home almost two decades ago became the first African-American President of the United States.

Hours later, around 2 a.m., Barack and Michelle, Robinson and his wife, Kelly, were back at the Obamas' Hyde Park home. The kids were in bed. The four of them sat around the kitchen table, eating pie, Craig going for pecan, the President-elect going for sweet potato. There was no use trying to achieve any kind of perspective in that moment.

It was too soon, and way too big. "We tried to let it sink in, but it really wasn't sinking in," Robinson says.


Craig Robinson hasn't gone from community organizer to commander-in-chief, but he has known change, too. Like Obama, he grew up humbly, in a gritty, working-class neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. And like Obama, Robinson's life direction has had everything to do with education.

Coming out of high school, Robinson was heavily recruited by both the University of Washington and Princeton. The former was offering a full ride, Princeton a financial-aid package that would leave his parents with a bill of $3,500 per year.

"It might as well have been a million dollars," Robinson says.

He told his father, Fraser Robinson, that he wanted to go to Washington. His father asked why, and Craig said he didn't want his parents to have to pay anything. The response prompted his father to drop his head, and shake it.

"If you pick a school based on what I have to pay, I'll be very disappointed," Fraser Robinson told his son.

Fraser Robinson suffered from multiple sclerosis, an affliction that did not stop him from going to work every day in Chicago's water department. He was a man that you desperately did not want to disappoint.


Fraser Robinson's son wound up at Princeton, his parents funding it with cash from an insurance policy and a credit card.

Says Craig now, "My father's decision changed my whole life. It changed all of our lives. If I hadn't gone to Princeton, my sister probably wouldn't have gone to Princeton and she never would've met Barack and none of this would've happened. All because of my father."

Robinson went on to be a two-time Ivy League player of the year, capping his collegiate career in Gill Coliseum, of all places, with an upset victory over highly ranked Oklahoma State in the 1983 NCAA Tournament. A No. 1 pick of the 76ers, he never made the NBA, but played briefly in England and then embarked on a prosperous career as a bond trader, getting his master's in finance from the University of Chicago and making big six-figure money, driving a Porsche and taking his wife and two kids on European and Caribbean vacations whenever it felt right.

Robinson's plan was to max out his income and get out of the financial world at 50. There was just one problem. "You had the feeling something was missing," he says. Eager to reconnect with his love of the game, he went to work as a small-college assistant and a high-school coach before landing a spot on the Northwestern staff of former Princeton coach Bill Carmody.

His starting salary was $50,000, he recalls, a pay cut of about 90%.

"It was well thought out," Carmody says of Robinson's career switch. "He wasn't doing it on a whim. He always knew he'd get back into it."

Six years at Northwestern helped Robinson land the job at Brown, where he won a school-record 19 games in his second year, doing it even as he juggled a second job he never expected to have: campaigning for the next President of the United States.

Robinson, who bears a striking resemblance to his sister, has made more than 50 appearances for Obama, and was in Iowa last January, when a watershed victory over Hillary Clinton was scored.

"Campaigning for 20 months, the way Barack and my sister did, has got to be the most brutal sport I've ever seen," Robinson says.


Robinson is convinced that a huge part of Barack Obama's attraction is that he is "a regular guy." Certainly, he is an extremely smart regular guy, and a breathtaking speaker, "but deep down he is as close to you and me as a President as we've ever seen, or ever will see."

One of Robinson's enduring images of Tuesday night was the family dinner the Obamas and Robinsons had in Hyde Park. Ten people were gathered, dining on prime rib and scallops and green beans and brown rice. It was seven o'clock. The TV was off. Pennsylvania, as big a battleground state as any, was projected for Obama while they ate, and if Obama got a text message to share the news, nobody knew. The kids talked about their day in school. The banter was easy, relaxed.

"It was about as normal as it could be," Robinson says.


The television came on afterward, and the news was all good. Ohio was projected for Obama, and Virginia and Indiana were looking good, and an hour or more before he left his home for Grant Park to make his acceptance speech, Obama's Electoral College total was way past 270, climbing into the 300s, and his future was clear.

"Congratulations, Mr. President," Robinson said.

To Craig Robinson, the wonder of this election goes far beyond what it means to African-Americans. He sees it as triumph of lightness over gloom, hope over cynicism, inclusion over exclusion.

"I think it's made everybody hopeful," Robinson says.

On Wednesday morning, Robinson woke up in the President-elect's house, and soon was flying back to Corvallis, to run his team through practice, trying to forge an attitude shift of his own with his Beavers, without invoking Obama directly.

"I guess that's the underlying message - we're going to change the culture of this team, and turn this thing around," junior forward Seth Tarver says.

Robinson got the OSU job last April, after several other coaches turned it down. More than a few people think of it as a black hole of the Pac-10, with Gill Coliseum feeling its 58 years, and with the Beavers' horrific recent history making the Ralph Miller Era seem from the 1870s and '80s, not the 1970s and '80s, never mind that OSU is actually the 13th winningest program in college basketball, and has sent a bundle of players to the NBA, Gary Payton, A.C. Green and Steve Johnson among them.

"I can't complain. If they were any good, I wouldn't be here," Robinson says, smiling. He gets another laugh from what he's heard on the recruiting trail, where rival coaches are telling kids that Robinson won't be here long, that he's headed for a job in the Obama administration.

"I'm a basketball coach. I'm not going anywhere," Robinson says.

Between the campaign and starting his program, Robinson hasn't even had time to decorate his office. The walls are bare, a map of the world and a photograph of nearby Mt. Hood waiting to be mounted. The season starts Friday, in Washington, D.C., against Howard University, a historically black college. Robinson had nothing to do with scheduling the game, but it is a good place to start, to try to sustain the feelings he felt so powerfully last Tuesday night in Chicago's Grant Park.

As he listened to Barack Obama speak and looked out at the crowd, at the hundreds of thousands of people who were taking in history, Craig Robinson says the power of the moment hit him profoundly. It was almost as if the thousands were one with the slender man speaking to them, as if they were taking on his persona, his passion, his call to serve, his belief that the world could be better. It's nice to believe that, isn't it?

"When you are a little kid, you always hear, 'One day, the world is going to be like this,'" Craig Robinson says. "That night in Grant Park, that's what I felt. It's as close as I've ever been to that."

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