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Is Being A Good Mentor (And Michelle Obama's Brother) Enough To Save Craig Robinson's Job?

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Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

CORVALLIS, Ore. — The mass text message went out on the morning of Aug. 25, 2008, a reminder from Oregon State University men’s basketball coach Craig Robinson that everyone should tune into any one of the major news channels that evening.

With his sister at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Paul J. Richards / AFP / Getty

This had nothing to do with basketball. Instead, Robinson was slated to introduce his younger sister Michelle Obama on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention. His speech would come two days before Barack Obama would officially accept the party’s presidential nomination.

One of the people who received the text message was Roberto Nelson, then a 17-year-old basketball star from Santa Barbara, Calif. Robinson had entered Nelson’s life only a few months earlier during a recruiting visit. Nelson came away especially impressed with Robinson, in part because the coach never brought up the subject of basketball.

“That was totally different from all the other coaches,” Nelson told BuzzFeed. “We just hit it off immediately. You could tell that he really cared about me as a person.”

Nelson was dazzled when he saw Robinson introduce the future first lady. Robinson strode to the stage in a black suit and bright orange tie, the colors of Oregon State. “Today,” Robinson told the crowd, “I’m proud to be the coach of the Oregon State men’s basketball team. Go Beavers!”

Roberto Nelson

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

“It was so powerful,” Nelson said recently, still awed at the memory. Nelson committed to Robinson and the Beavers a few weeks later, choosing the traditional basketball doormat over national powers such as UCLA, Florida, and Ohio State.

“I had to explain it to people,” recalled Nelson, now a 23-year-old fifth-year senior for the Beavers. “I was thinking more about my future than they were. I understood the vision that Coach Rob had.”

That vision includes living meaningful lives on and off the court, the sort of well-rounded experience that so many colleges claim to offer to their athletes. The 6-foot-7-inch Robinson is the embodiment of that ideal: He was a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year, a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He was a successful businessman before he pursued a career as a college basketball coach.

Robinson lived up to expectations at Oregon State in all ways — except basketball. So Craig Robinson epitomizes an uncomfortable question: Is it enough for a coach to mentor boys into accomplished men in full, or does he also have to win?

Now at the end of his sixth year in Corvallis, Robinson has a record of 94-105 overall, 39-69 in the PAC-12 Conference. Oregon State has finished better than eighth place in the league only once.

The nadir came Wednesday in a third-tier post-season tournament called the College Basketball Invitational. The Beavers got eliminated in the first found, losing 96-92 at home to to Radford — a team that in regular season had lost by double digits to Hampton and Virginia Military Institute and that had exactly one starter taller than 6 feet 4 inches. In the arena, the number of empty seats was jarring. “I was told there were more people at Gill Coliseum for the 4A girls consolation finals Saturday morning than tonight,” tweeted Steve Gress, the sports editor from the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

The next morning, The Oregonian — the state’s largest daily newspaper — ran this headline: “Should Oregon State Beavers fire Craig Robinson?” Nearly two-thirds of the more than 4,000 voters chose this option: “Yes. He’s had enough time to show what he can do … and it’s underwhelming.”

In his best-selling memoir A Game of Character: A Family Journey from Chicago’s Southside to the Ivy League and Beyond, Robinson explains his theory — learned from his late father — that “you could tell everything you needed to know about someone by how they played the game.” He famously used a pickup game in 1990 to assess the character of his sister’s new beau at the time, a young Chicago lawyer named Barack Obama. “He was real, down-to-earth, a good guy,” Robinson wrote. “He had passed the test with a definitive thumbs-up on his playing and character.”

“Playing and character.” By his own account, both measures matter. But on the first, Robinson’s Oregon State hasn’t been good enough to succeed against its peers in the PAC-12.

This is a story about Craig Robinson and whether that uncomfortable but unavoidable fact should matter.

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

Almost any parent would want Craig Robinson to mentor their son. Whether at work or home, he has made it known that the door is always open to his players. In his memoir, he wrote of “letting (his) players see me not just as a basketball expert — but also as a husband, a father, and a citizen,” a change from Princeton, where he never even met his coach’s wife.

Nelson, as much as anyone, has taken advantage of the open-door policy. There was the time, he said, that he told Robinson about his plans to retire at 50. Robinson gave his protégé a lesson in financial planning.

“He told me, ‘If you have a kid, just think about the price of college tuition now compared to how much it’s going to be,’” Nelson said. “That kind of set me back. Like, basically, I can’t stop working. I have a long way to go before I’m financially where I want to be.”

“He’s still a young man trying to figure things out; it was one of those lightbulb moments for him,” Robinson said. “I really try not to be too preachy. I learned that from my own dad. My dad was an easy guy to talk to. He wasn’t judgmental. And I just found if I come at it from that sort of angle, these guys will sit there and listen and ask more questions.”

Robinson playing for Princeton in 1983.

Peter Morgan / AP Photo

Robinson’s biography parallels the first couple’s: Their stories all involved modest upbringings, Ivy League educations, Chicago connections, professional success, and national prominence. But while the president plays basketball as a hobby, Robinson chose it as a career.

After playing for Hall of Fame coach Pete Carril and graduating from Princeton, Robinson secured a spot in a sales training program with Proctor & Gamble and then pursued a roster spot with the Philadelphia 76ers. Robinson, who knew the odds of making it in the NBA were long, was one of the team’s final cuts.

In his memoir, Robinson remembers 76ers assistant coach Matt Guokas telling him, “You’ve got a job with P&G, so you don’t need to worry about this.” It’s been a common thread in his life; Robinson’s talents have always seemed to be meant for more than games. “I was livid,” Robinson said. And he continued to pursue his hoop dream, spending two years with a professional team in Manchester, England.

When his playing days were finally over, Robinson returned to Princeton to talk with Carril about getting into coaching. Robinson remembers the famously irascible coach encouraging him to make another career choice, calling it a “dead-end, no-win, thankless job.”

Carril doesn’t quite remember it that way. “I wouldn’t say it was a dead-end job. But he didn’t come to Princeton and study his rear end off to get into something like coaching,” he said. “Craig had talent in other areas, so I thought it’d be better for him to do that. I just suggested other alternatives.”

Robinson became a broker at the retail brokerage firm Dean Witter, got married, had two children, and settled into a comfortable life in Chicago. He spent the rest of the decade as a bond trader, including seven years as a vice president of the firm.

In time, however, the six-bedroom home, high-six-figure salary and related perks — the Porsche, designer suits, jewelry, and five-star vacations — weren’t enough to sustain him or his marriage, he wrote. By the end of the decade, his marriage was on the rocks, and he seized an opportunity to coach at a local high school. Robinson got immediate results, helping the University of Chicago Lab School win its first league championship in 25 years.

Still, “I had no idea that I’d eventually end up coaching” full-time, Robinson said, sitting in his office. “I went into investments and thought I had it all figured out. Then, boom, things change. Your life takes on a life of its own.”

The moment of decision came on the trading floor the day after Labor Day 2000. Robinson took a phone call from new Northwestern coach Bill Carmody — another former Carril assistant — who offered him a position on his coaching staff. Robinson would become a 38-year-old assistant coach, an especially late start in a career that values youth and energy.

Even more inauspiciously, Robinson has said he made a fraction of what he was making in finance. That was particularly bad timing for someone going through a divorce settlement that required him to make child-support payments based on his former earnings. He was forced to move back into his childhood home on Chicago’s South Side with his mother.

At Northwestern, Robinson helped turn “a basement program into a competitor.” The Wildcats never reached the NCAA tournament and rarely finished in the top half of the Big 10 Conference, but they were no longer a doormat. Unbeknownst at the time, this stretch would look an awful lot like his time at Oregon State. “We started in the basement,” Robinson said. “It’s hard to get people to understand that. They want stuff fast.”

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

He moved on to his first college head-coaching opportunity in 2006 with Brown University, an Ivy League school without much basketball pedigree or the ability to award athletic scholarships. Robinson accepted the job on a Monday in June and married his current wife, the former Kelly McCrum, that very Saturday.

Brown — a school that was barely drawing 1,000 fans per game — got stuff fast. By the end of his second year, Robinson had won a school-record 19 games and led the Bears to only their fourth postseason berth (albeit in the less prestigious College Basketball Invitational) in 108 years. He’d even managed to split a two-game series with Northwestern and win all four games against Princeton.

He did it by taking the renowned Princeton offense — a system of constant motion, passing, and backdoor cuts — he learned under Carril, the motivational abilities of Carmody, and his own natural leadership ability to win trust and build the confidence of a players in a program accustomed to losing.

“He was always there as a role model, a coach, and a mentor,” said Damon Hoffman, who played his final two seasons at Brown under Robinson. “There was never a doubt about whether he was going to be a great coach. But his personality and demeanor is meant for a big-time program. We knew that right away. There was no hesitation.”

On the other side of the country, more than 3,000 miles away, Oregon State was looking for someone who just wanted the job after finishing 6-25, including 0-18 in the league. The Beavers even lost to Division II Alaska-Fairbanks. At least three candidates — it’s rumored as many 30 coaches were contacted — had already turned down what was then the PAC-10’s worst job.

As Oregon State was reeling from those rejections, Robinson’s agent reached out to Beavers athletic director Bob De Carolis. Robinson didn’t have the experience typical of most other big-time college coaches, but the Beavers were open to trying something different.

There were skeptics close to home. “Robinson has one winning season as a head coach,” wrote The Oregonian’s longtime sports columnist John Canzano. “It’s a ridiculous hire.”

OSU President Edward Ray told ESPN.com that De Carolis, who didn’t respond to numerous requests for an interview, did not tell him about their new coach’s famous family ties until late in the process. “And I said, ‘You know what, if he doesn’t win some basketball games, nobody is going to give a damn who his brother-in-law is.'”

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

Robinson entered Roberto Nelson’s life during an especially wrenching period. Only a couple months before Nelson’s senior year of high school, his father Bruce Nelson was sent to prison for a sex offense.

The case was big news in Santa Barbara, where Roberto was one of the city’s most-celebrated athletes and his father was an assistant basketball coach at the same high school. Bruce Nelson, himself a former high school star and college athlete, had poured much of his life into the development of his only son. Their relationship was first detailed in the book Play Their Hearts Out, a look at the sleazy side of the youth basketball circuit by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Dohrmann.

After Roberto's father was sent to prison, his grades suffered, putting his college eligibility in jeopardy. He endured numerous slights at school. He ached for his father.

Then he met Robinson, who was a model for balancing athletics and academics. “He stepped in and picked up that void and helped Roberto keep his head,” Bruce Nelson told BuzzFeed.

Yet when Roberto committed to Oregon State, his father was disappointed. He wanted him to go to a traditional powerhouse, Ohio State, near where Bruce was raised and still has family, or UCLA. Of course, Bruce Nelson was in no position to help or advise his son from prison. Even today, his disappointment lingers.

“That just came too far out of left field,” said the elder Nelson, who was released from Tehachapi State Prison in December 2011 and remains in Santa Barbara, looking for work as a coach again. “When you look at the schools he could have gone to, you kind of have to scratch your head. I didn’t think Roberto could go there and resurrect things.”

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed


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