Men's Journal

So what does Obama’s game reveal about his character? To find out I asked Coach Robinson. Robinson’s own story is one of ignoring limits. He grew up with his sister Michelle on Chicago’s South Side and became a star player at Princeton under the legendary coach Pete Carril, who has the most wins of any Ivy League basketball coach ever. He is the only coach to win more than 500 games without athletic scholarships, and he developed a slow-moving, pass-heavy Princeton offense that inspired protégés like Georgetown’s John Thompson as well as Robinson.

A first team All-Ivy player — twice — Robinson took a high-paying Wall Street job shortly after college and drove a Porsche and a BMW, but eventually he followed his passion: He worked his way up through the ranks to become the coach at Brown University and now at Oregon State, where he leads the Beavers (who, it must be said, are having another mediocre year). “It’s a game where you have to cooperate, and lead, and share,” he told me. “You have to be unselfish to get better.” Robinson notes that Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls only began to win championships when His Airness began to pass the ball more.

In the late ’80s, Robinson had the assignment of checking out the skinny kid with the big ears who was dating his sister. Michelle had overheard Craig and their father Fraser talking about how basketball reveals character. She told them that her boyfriend, Barack, fancied himself a player and asked if Craig would give him the once-over. The older brother agreed. To judge Obama, Craig took him over to the gym at Chicago’s Lab School, an elite private school, where they played five-on-five with other guys. “He didn’t know I was checking him out,” Robinson told me. “That would have ruined the experiment.” He liked what he saw. It wasn’t that Obama was a great player, of Robinson’s caliber, but he was good, with a strong outside shot. He was self-aware enough not to get right under the basket, where a 6-foot-1 string bean like him could get roughed up. He played hard and passed a lot — but not too often, which Robinson liked. “That would have meant he was sucking up,” he told me. When he got home he told Michelle that the kid was all right.

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Basketball surely helped make obama who he is. The turbulent childhood with a father who left, a mother often absent; deposited in Indonesia from Honolulu as if he were brought in on some weird Pacific current — yet he remains the picture of grace under pressure. There are other reasons for that, of course. Obama writes about his grandmother’s steadfastness, and Hawaii’s aloha style certainly put a premium on being laid-back. And in a sense, it is perhaps not too surprising that a child who had to handle all that family disruption would end up so levelheaded. But in hoops, Obama found an island. Growing up a mixed-race child in mixed-race Hawaii, he discovered his African-American identity as much on the public courts of Honolulu as he did by reading James Baldwin or Langston Hughes. He played a black style, more showy, with behind-the-back passes and more trash talk. He kept a poster of Julius Erving on his wall, the one of him soaring toward the basket, with his knee braces and huge Afro.

At the prestigious Punahou School, where he was one of a handful of black students, Obama’s game was too street, too pickup for the coach, who used him sparingly. Obama was frustrated being the seventh or eighth man instead of a starter. By the time he’d arrived at Columbia University, he’d largely given up the sport, occasionally seeking out a court in Harlem but only rarely, focusing more on his studies and running. As a community organizer in Chicago after college, his playing time increased, and when he went to Harvard for his law degree, he spent even more time on the hard court. When he returned to Chicago with his J.D. and a determination to run for public office, basketball became part of his image.

In the world of pickup basketball, without refs and with plenty of trash talk, it’s easy to get into fights. Not Obama’s style, says Marty Nesbitt, the businessman who helped introduce the future president to Chicago. “In these pickup games things get pretty heated, with disputed calls and fouls. He never engages in that and resolves things quickly and moves on.” Obama is not a trash-talker in the Charles Barkley sense but a gentle teaser more likely to say, “Is that all you’ve got?” than to wisecrack about someone’s momma.

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