Michelle Obama is a senator’s wife and the sister of an Ivy League coach.

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AP

PROVIDENCE — Maybe it was moments after Brown had defeated the University of California at Davis in December, and he was shaking hands with the opposing players, when one of them said, “I just want to tell you, coach, that I’m voting for your brother-in-law.”

Maybe it was when he realized that he had become Michelle Obama’s brother, even though it always had been the other way around, Michelle always being known as his little sister.

Maybe it was simply the realization that his brother-in-law might actually become the next president of the United States.

“I had no idea of the magnitude of it,” he says. “This is another level.”

But this is not about Barack Obama, or even Michelle Obama. Nor is it about the past year that’s changed his life in ways that once would have been unimaginable.

No, this is about Craig Robinson, who is an amazing story in his own right, someone who knows how both education and basketball can change a family’s history, change everything, can be the promise of America in ways we still like to believe are possible.

Or what are the odds that someone who came from Chicago’s South Side and went to an inner-city elementary school, the son of parents who didn’t have a college education, would grow up to be both a success in the financial world and then an Ivy League basketball coach, and oh yeah, have a sister who could end up as the country’s first lady?

There were no odds.

“Our parents were our motivation,” he says.

His father, who worked for the city of Chicago, had multiple sclerosis, walked with a limp, and went to work on crutches. His mother worked as a secretary. They lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a brick bungalow. When he and his sister were just kids, the only white family on the block moved out.

“But our parents trained us to get good grades,” Robinson says.

They also trained them not to get crippled by race and color and people’s prejudices, raised him and his sister to believe they were as good as anyone else, and that it was ultimately about hard work and achievement, not anything else.

And basketball became the passport, too.

Robinson went to Mt. Carmel High School, a parochial school whose alumni include Antoine Walker and Donovan McNabb, a good-enough player to be offered a scholarship to the University of Washington. But he had gone to a summer basketball camp, where one of the directors had a Princeton connection.

The Ivy League?

What was that?

At the time, Princeton’s tuition was $14,000 a year, which was like a million dollars on the South Side of Chicago then. Yet even though he was going to get a lot of aid, he was leaning toward Washington, where he could go for free, when his father said, “If you pick a school for what I have to pay, I’m going to be disappointed.”

So in the summer of 1979 he took the bus from New York City to the ivied elegance of Princeton with a suitcase and a duffel bag, feeling as lost as lost can be. All around him were kids pulling up in flashy new cars carrying fans.

“I was overwhelmed by Princeton,” he says. “I was so far behind, and I didn’t even have a fan.”

After the first semester he was struggling in school so he called his father and said he was overmatched.

“He told me that you’re not going to be number one at Princeton,” Robinson says, “but you’re not going to be last either. That kind of put it all in perspective for me. After that, I was all right.”

Two years later, his sister joined him at Princeton because, as Robinson says, “her attitude was ‘I’ve always been smarter than my brother and if he can get in I can, too.’ ”

He became a two-time Ivy player of the year at Princeton, was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers, spent two years playing overseas. Then he went to work in the Chicago financial world. He worked for Morgan Stanley for nine years, becoming a vice president, before becoming the director of a smaller firm in Chicago. He made a lot of money, he had a wife and two small children, had the American Dream in the palm of his hand.

And he wasn’t happy.

As if the game was still a siren song. He always had helped out with a couple of local teams, always had figured he’d probably end up coaching a seventh-grade team somewhere.

“Once you have the big house and the nice car, and have been on all the nice vacations, then what?” he says. “It was a job, not a passion. I was working that job because I thought it would make my family happy.’

It didn’t.

Then one day he learned that Bill Carmody, who had been his assistant coach at Princeton, was the new coach at Northwestern. He figured he would hang around once in a while and try to help him out. Then Carmody called and asked him if he wanted to be an assistant coach.

“I was on the trading floor,” he says, “so I took a break, got in a cab and rode around for a half hour thinking about it.”

When he left his job to become Carmody’s assistant he was 37, was going through a divorce, and had custody of his two young children. He also took a pay cut that was roughly 90 percent of his previous salary.

“Not one time have I regretted my decision,” he says. “I’m loving every day of my life.”

He remarried in June 2006, shortly after the news conference introducing him as the next Brown coach, and both he and his wife Kelly are heavily involved in the Obama campaign. Kelly Robinson and her two step kids were in Illinois a year ago when Obama made his official announcement. Robinson has given innumerable interviews about the time his sister asked him to take Obama with him to play pickup basketball, back when she was first dating him, and figured that pickup basketball was a litmus test.

“That was back when I had more cachet than Barack,” smiles Robinson.

All that’s changed now, of course.

Maybe no one has more cachet than Obama, and Robinson has become Michelle Obama’s brother, in this incredible family saga, this one that began in an apartment on Chicago’s South Side and ends who knows where, this story of America and its promise.

“You couldn’t make this up,” says Craig Robinson.

No, you couldn’t.

breynold@projo.com