With a hint of 5 o’clock shadow and small bags under his eyes, Oregon State coach Craig Robinson took the basketball court on Wednesday to start a campaign that is nearly as daunting as the one he just helped to complete. For the past 20 months, Robinson assisted his brother-in-law Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. Robinson stumped in Iowa, gave speeches in Washington State and did interviews about his childhood on Chicago’s South Side with his younger sister, Michelle, who is married to Obama. All that work culminated in one magical Tuesday for Robinson and his family as they ate dinner at the Obamas’ house on election night and later exchanged congratulatory hugs onstage at Grant Park in Chicago. “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been able to process it yet,” Robinson said less than 24 hours later as he sat on the bleachers at Gill Coliseum after practice. “It’s wild. I don’t know what to say.” Now that the Obamas are preparing to enter the White House and Robinson can devote all his energy to his first season at Oregon State, Robinson and the president-elect can debate about whose task is tougher. Robinson simply inherited an Oregon State program that is coming off an 0-18 season in the Pacific-10, carrying a 21-game losing streak and looking for its first NCAA tournament appearance since 1990. He installed the Princeton-style offense that he used to lead Brown to a team-record 19 victories last season. He also brought many of the themes prevalent in the Obama campaign: change, hope and reform. Robinson’s players at Brown said he went out of his way to separate politics and basketball. He would walk a block from his office on Hope Street and duck into the Blue State Coffee shop to talk politics. (Jesse Agel, Brown’s new coach, said he would send Robinson a pound of Blue State Coffee, with its “drink liberally” slogan, to congratulate him.) Although Robinson was happy to discuss politics with anyone who asked, he would never start the conversation. But as Robinson went from coaching in the Ivy League to coaching in the Pac-10 and his brother-in-law went from representing Illinois in the Senate to being elected the nation’s 44th president, those discussions are becoming harder to avoid. In a fitting twist, Oregon State’s first regular-season game under Robinson is Friday at Howard University in Washington, the future home of the Obamas. Robinson joked that he wished he had been clever enough to create that matchup. “There’s going to be so much pressure on them,” Robinson said of his players and the expected circuslike atmosphere surrounding the game. “But you know what? If you’re going to win games on the road in the Pac-10, then you have to win these kinds of games. We might as well just do it.” Now that the pressure of the election is off, Robinson’s job is to bring change to Oregon State. His campaign kicks off Friday.
