Craig Robinson is a reasonably famous person. First of all, he's the head basketball coach at Oregon State University. In the early 1980's he was a two-time Ivy League player of the year at Princeton. But he's probably most famous because of his sister, Michelle.
Like her brother Craig, Michelle Robinson graduated with top grades from Princeton. She then got her JD from Harvard Law School and began working at the law firm Sidley Austin in Chicago.
Craig Robinson spent the 80's pursuing first a pro basketball playing career in Europe, then a coaching career at Illinois Tech, where he was an assitant. In 1990 he went back to school in Chicago to get a master's in finance, then worked as a bond trader before returning to coaching in 1999 at Northwestern.
In 1991, Michelle asked Craig for a favor. She had met a fellow attorney at Sidley Austin who was single, and she was considering dating him. But she wanted her brother, whom she trusted, to size him up first. Craig agreed and invited the 30-year-old lawyer to play pickup basketball. Afterward he provided his sister with this assessment: "When I played basketball with him, he was quietly confident, which means he had good self esteem without being cocky. He was certainly a team player. He wasn't a pig. He passed when he was supposed to pass, and he cut when he was supposed to cut. To me, that speaks to a lack of selfishness. He had natural leadership ability. He didn't just pass me the ball because he wanted to date my sister. Whenever a player gets tired, he reverts back to the player he truly is. That's how you tell. And we played for hours. That's how I could tell."
You probably already know that the young lawyer was Barack Obama and that Michelle Robinson married him the following year and now lives with him in the White House. That's only one of the stories I found while researching people associated with Oregon State University, Boise State's opponent in the Hawaii Bowl.
Oregon State's most famous alum, or at least the one mentioned most often, is Linus Pauling. Pauling was one of the fathers of quantum chemistry and won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954. Following World War Two he became an anti-nuclear weapons and anti-war activist and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He also studied biochemistry and is the person who told us that high doses of vitamin C could prevent colds and treat cancer, something about which scientists are still arguing.
Former Idaho governor and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus went to Oregon State, as did Nevada senator John Ensign, U-Haul founder Leonard Shoen and former Hewlett-Packard CEO John Young.
If you've ever used a Leatherman tool, you can thank Oregon State graduate Timothy Leatherman, who came up with the PST, or pocket survivor tool, while trying to invent a Boy Scout knife with pliers.
Dick Fosbury, Olympic gold medalist and inventor of the Fosbury Flop highjumping technique, went to Oregon State. So did Pinto Colvig, the first person ever to play Bozo the Clown and the original voice of Goofy in Disney cartoons.
Bobby Henderson also went to Oregon State. You may never have heard of him, but Bobby Henderson started a religion in 2005 when he proposed in a protest letter to the Kansas Board of Education the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Kansas at that time was considering banning the teaching of evolution, and Henderson wrote that there was no more proof of creationism than there was proof that a Flying Spaghetti Monster floated around the world changing the results of carbon dating. It was his take on the writings of Bertrand Russell, who said that something doesn't necessarily exist just because you can't prove it doesn't. The ensuing religion is called "Pastafarianism".
And as the saying goes, in Corvallis, Oregon there must be something in the water. Oregon State is the only school that can boast having two Playboy Playmates of the Year, Jodi Ann Paterson in 2000 and Sara Jean Underwood in 2007. Also, my grandmother went there when it was still called Oregon Agricultural College. She was never in Playboy, but my grandpa thought she was pretty cute.
