Michelle Obama's story compelling on its own

A few weeks ago, I learned Michelle Obama, wife of probable presidential nominee Barack Obama, has one sibling, a brother, Craig Robinson, and he was head basketball coach at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

As of April 7, Robinson is head basketball coach at Oregon State University, in the Pac-10.

Most of us know Brown is an Ivy League school that's hard to get into. If you follow sports, you also know Brown doesn't give athletic scholarships, so it doesn't often produce athletic juggernauts.

Nevertheless, the Ivy League has had some good basketball teams, like Princeton - with twice-All American, New York Knicks hero, Rhodes Scholar and eventual U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley - and Penn, with teams that have given traditional powerhouses fits in the first and second rounds.

Princeton coach Pete Carill spent 29 years on the New Jersey campus, winning 514 games with a thinking man's offense and players like Bradley and Craig Robinson, whom he recruited from the South Side of Chicago, source of many great basketball players but not many Princeton graduates.

Coach John Thompson III of Georgetown is a product of Princeton, where he later coached, and of Pete Carill.

Michelle Obama's brother was twice Ivy League Player of the Year and twice led Princeton to the NCAA Tournament - and you K-Staters know how hard that is. The Tigers made their mark in 1983 by defeating Oklahoma State, with Robinson pulling down 16 rebounds.

Robinson was drafted in the fourth round - back when the NBA had more than two rounds - but was destined to play professionally in Europe for five years before returning to pull down an MBA in finance from the distinguished University of Chicago in 1992.

I don't know Robinson's politics, but he could have been compromised by his stay at the notably conservative University of Chicago or by serving as an executive at Chicago's Continental Bank and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.

Whatever, the sounds of bouncing basketballs and smells of liniment pulled Craig back to the other place where he excelled. In 1999, he became assistant coach at Northwestern, a Big 10 floor mat that improved while he was there.

Then, at Brown, Robinson was 2008 Ivy League Coach of the year after his team went 19-10 and 11-3 in the league, including sweeping dear old Princeton for the second time in Brown history.

This week I caught Robinson on TV talking about his sister, a 1985 graduate of Princeton, and of Harvard Law. "She figured if I could go to Princeton, she could, too."

What about his sister as first lady?

Robinson called the idea "surreal." He said he thought she could do anything she set her mind to but, laughing, said he thought it was more likely to be "something like swimming around the world."

I delivered babies in homes of the South Side of Chicago via the Chicago Maternity Center in 1947, about 14 years before Craig saw the light of day. Some of the homes were neat, and there was certainly evidence of people struggling to improve their lives.

But it wasn't a place anyone would expect to be the birthplace of a prospective first lady.

Between 1947 and Craig's and Michelle's births came Brown v. Board and Martin Luther King; shortly thereafter were the presidencies of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Somehow, it is easier for me to envision Barack as president than Michelle as first lady. After all, he is a white man with a black father - or is he a black man with a white mother? But, without question, she is a true daughter of Chicago's South Side.

Back to sports, one doesn't have to be a coach to look at Michelle and Barack on stage and identify from which parent Natasha and Malia Ann Obama's future athletic ability may spring.

Or, to remind Barack to spend some time with brother-in-law before he goes on the court again with the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Bill Roy is a retired physician and former member of Congress. He has a law degree and lives in Topeka. He may be reached at wirroy@aol.com.

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