Obama from a coach -- and in-law's -- perspective

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I asked Craig Robinson to talk about the side of Barack Obama you don't see in public. I figured he would know. Robinson is the brother of Obama's wife, Michelle. He is 45 and coach of the Brown University basketball team.He told me there is no different side."He's really authentic," said Robinson. "What you see is what you get." He told me that wasn't just a brother-in-law speaking. When Robinson travels to campaign headquarters in different states, workers tell him Obama strikes them as the same person they see on the air."He must snap behind the scenes sometimes," I said.Robinson smiled. "My sister wouldn't put up with that."Robinson is a big man, 6-foot-6. He grew up in Chicago, graduated from Princeton and eventually left behind a big Morgan-Stanley salary to get back to his love of basketball, first as assistant coach at Northwestern and two years ago as head coach at Brown. He lives in Providence, R. I., with his wife and two children.Robinson first met Obama when Obama was attending Harvard Law School and spending the summer as an associate at the same Chicago law firm where Michelle Robinson worked. The two had dated a few times and one night, she brought him to have dinner at the home of her parents on the city's South Side. Craig came, too. "First impression was that he was smart, easygoing, good sense of humor," said Robinson. "I thought, 'Too bad he won't be around for long.' "Why did he think that?Because, he explained, guys never lasted with Michelle. "They'd do something and she'd say, 'That's it.' They'd be fired." Still, he was impressed that Obama made it as far as a dinner with the family. A few months after that dinner, Obama was still in the picture. Michelle called her brother to ask a favor. She remembered him saying that you can tell a guy's personality on the basketball court. Could he get Barack into a pickup game and report back?Robinson called some friends and put it together. Obama had played in high school in Hawaii, but some of these guys were at a higher level. Robinson himself had been the fourth leading scorer in the history of Princeton basketball. They met to play at a nearby school. "I was happy to report back he was a good guy on the court," Robinson recalled. "He was confident without being cocky. He was intense; he wanted to win. If he thought a call needed to be argued, he'd argue; but mostly he just played with a lot of integrity. And he didn't just pass the ball to me because I was Michelle's brother."Did the two ever do other activities?Not really. Robinson says basketball is Obama's main sport, and they've continued to play pickup over the years.Eventually, Robinson realized that Obama was different in Michelle's eyes, and in 1992, he was attending their Chicago wedding. Robinson's basketball team has done well this year, and he often sees the presidential campaign through the lens of a coach.He said that in both politics and basketball, it's rare for competitors to know how to come from behind and then adjust their play as a front-runner, and perhaps come back again if they suddenly get passed by. He tries to teach that to his players. He says Obama gets that, but not all candidates do.Does he get to talk to Obama these days?Yes, the candidate called recently after the Brown team beat Penn and then Princeton on the same weekend at each opponent's home court, a first-ever Brown achievement. Obama follows it closely, and phoned his brother-in-law to congratulate him.I asked the odds of a President Obama."I'm a coach," said Craig Robinson, "so I don't want to jinx it."He waited a beat and then couldn't help himself:"But I like our chances."(Contact Mark Patinkin at mpatinkin(at)projo.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)