Brown University basketball coach Craig Robinson is presidential candidate Barack Obama’s brother-in-law.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE — Brown basketball coach Craig Robinson remembers the first time he met Barack Obama.

Robinson’s sister, Michelle, had begun dating Obama, whom she had met when he was an intern at the Chicago law firm where she worked. One day, she brought him home to meet the family.

“He had been a basketball player,” remembers Robinson, “so we had that in common. He was obviously very bright, but he was low-key too, a regular guy, someone you would play pickup basketball with and he would fit in.”

At one point they were talking about the future. Obama said he might like to get into politics, and then, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, added that he might even want to run for president some day.

“President?” said Robinson. “President of what?”

This was roughly 15 years ago, and what were the odds then that Obama would actually be running for president of the United States?

Robinson just laughs at the question.

He is sitting in his office inside the Pizzitola Athletic Center, a small room that seems so very far away from the bright lights and white-hot intensity of a presidential campaign. His sister, who married Obama in 1992, is in the middle of that campaign, but Robinson knows she was a great success story before she ever met Barack Obama.

“We grew up in a hard-working, disciplined family,” says Robinson. “Our father had MS — I don’t remember him without a limp — but he went to work every day. And he hadn’t gone to college himself, but he cared very much about education.”

Michelle Robinson took two buses every day from the South Side of Chicago to a magnet school, and from there she went on to Princeton and Harvard Law School.

“My sister is one tough girl,” he says. “I’m older and I’m still afraid of her. She’s very accomplished, so she needs someone as accomplished as her, and she also needs someone who can stand up to her.

“So, we in the family, we were just hoping that she could hang on to this guy, because it was readily apparent he could stand up to her.”

But it wasn’t until 1996, when Obama first ran for the state Senate in Illinois, that Robinson saw his political appeal.

“You could see the excitement he invoked in people,” he says. “From the beginning, it seemed like he was able to give people hope.”

Now the stakes are so much higher, and Obama’s candidacy changes the lives of everyone around him. Michelle Robinson was, at first, reluctant for her husband to run for president, because, as her brother says, “she wanted her two kids to grow up the way we did. But that’s impossible now.”

Craig Robinson now gets two or three requests a week for interviews about his brother-in-law. His wife, Kelly, and their two children went out to Illinois last weekend for Obama’s announcement, then went to a caucus in Iowa with him later that day and a rally at Iowa State that night, while Robinson was with his Brown team for a game at Columbia.

“It’s important for the country to see what Barack’s family is like,” he says, “for he is going to be scrutinized like no other candidate ever has been. So it’s in for a penny, in for a pound. It changes all our lives.”

Obama has been to Rhode Island three times since Robinson got the Brown job last June, twice to campaign for Sheldon Whitehouse, once to speak at Brown, where Robinson’s entire team turned out. During one visit, Robinson’s 10-year-old daughter Leslie was with Obama the entire time, hanging out with both Whitehouse and Jack Reed, the kind of experience you don’t get in a trip to the mall.

“Barack’s got the ability to get young people to care about politics, to have hope,” he says, “and I would say that even if he wasn’t my brother-in-law. He’s the first person I ever wore a button for. I can co-sign for him, as they used to say in my old neighborhood. I can trust him.”

And Robinson knows how unbelievable it is that this guy who once told him he might want to run for president some day, back when it seemed as far away as the dark side of the moon, is now actually doing it This man who has seemingly come out of nowhere; this guy who, in the beginning anyway, was just someone he hoped could be in his sister’s life for a while, and now has become the most intriguing figure in this presidential race.

He also knows how unbelievable it is that his father — a black man from the South Side of Chicago, a man who suffered with MS yet still was able to steer two children to college and to a life that must have seemed almost unimaginable at the time — now has a son-in-law who is running for president, even if he is not alive to see it.

The enduring promise of America?

Craig Robinson knows it’s Barack Obama, regardless of how this campaign turns out.

breynold@projo.com