Robinson '83 courts the voters

Robinson’s sister is Michelle Obama ’85, and Robinson is very supportive of his brother-in-law Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.)’s campaign.

“What you see on TV is exactly what he’s like,” Robinson said. “He is an ordinary guy running for the presidency. He’s smart, and he’s thoughtful, and he is the kind of the person who can bring people together.”

Robinson has also demonstrated the same positive qualities. As a kid growing up in the South Side of Chicago, he was a good student with a limited set of options for the future. Princeton entered his radar screen only after his basketball skills garnered significant attention. He enrolled and became the first in his family to attend an Ivy League school. Robinson highlights the importance of athletics in his life as well as in the lives of kids in similar positions.

“Especially for kids from the inner city, [athletics] can open doors that wouldn’t be opened for you,” Robinson said.

As a Tiger, Robinson became the league’s first two-time Player of the Year and led the team to two NCAA Tournament appearances. After graduating, he was drafted by the NBA but instead went overseas to play in Europe for two years. Upon his return stateside, he entered the financial services world in Chicago. He worked for Dean Witter, returned to school to get his MBA from the University of Chicago and then took a job with Morgan Stanley.

“During this whole time while I was working in corporate America, I always stayed close to basketball,” Robinson said. “I was either playing with ex-Princeton players, [helping ex-Princeton coaches] Coach [Pete] Carrill and Coach [Bill] Carmody with recruiting in Chicago, and then I also coached a high school basketball team … You do your job because it’s your job, and you do all the extracurricular stuff because you love it.”

After more than a decade in the investment-banking world and one more switch to a smaller firm, a phone call from Carmody presented Robinson with the opportunity to make the extracurricular his full-time job. Carmody, the head coach at Northwestern, offered Robinson a job as an assistant coach.

“I knew that I was good at what I did in the corporate world, but I did not love what I did,” Robinson said. “So I took the job.”

After six years at Northwestern, Robinson snagged the head coaching position at Brown. He calls Brown “a terrific school” with “a very welcoming environment.” He does, however, find it a little odd to face his alma mater. When Brown traveled to play Princeton in Jadwin last year, it was Robinson’s first game at Princeton since graduation.

“I was on the wrong side,” Robinson said. “I wasn’t on the Princeton bench, I wasn’t in the Princeton locker room. Everything about it was just a weird feeling.”

He overcame the strangeness to coach his team to victory over the Tigers. He made a strong impression in his first year at Brown and was named Ivy League Men’s Basketball Coach of the Year by Basketball U. Robinson is clearly passionate about basketball and considers it life training.

“The concept of being on a team and learning how to win and how to depend on each other and discipline and hard work — all those catch words that you hear people talking about now when they’re hiring people — are the fundamentals of a basketball team,” Robinson said.

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These fundamentals might be useful to his brother-in-law in the upcoming months. Obama could use some of the life skills learned through basketball to win the nomination. So what does Robinson think about the presidential hopeful’s skills on the court? “Barack has game,” Robinson said. “He’s a pretty good pick-up player.”

With Obama’s ties to Columbia and Harvard, and the Robinsons’ ties to Princeton, it might seem problematic for the family to root for Brown. But Robinson settles the score, saying they put family and home first.

“My family roots for Brown basketball first,” Robinson said. “And then they root for the Bulls.”