“Get That Giraffe Off The Court!”
When I was in eighth grade, I scored sixty points or more in several basketball games.
There was a simple reason. I was six-foot-one and most of the boys I played against hadn’t reached five-foot-five.
At that age, eight inches isn’t a measurement. It’s an advantage.
Parents complained to my coach. They complained to the referees. They even heckled my parents and asked to see a birth certificate.
They wanted a level playing field, and to them, one unusually tall kid was proof the game wasn’t fair. To them, the solution seemed obvious. Remove me.
A year later, I learned why their solution wasn’t that simple.
I had grown another inch, but suddenly that inch didn’t matter much. I was still tall, but no longer unusually tall. I was still skinny, the way most freshmen are.
One night my coach sent me into a game with a simple assignment.
Guard Mike Munchak.
If you know football, you know the name. He would become an All-American at Penn State and eventually a Hall of Fame lineman for the Houston Oilers.
At the time, he was simply the biggest human being I had ever stood next to on a basketball court.
I remember him setting a pick on me. It wasn’t dirty or malicious, but I can still remember the feeling of running into him. It felt less like another player and more like a brick wall that had somehow learned to dribble.
Laid out on the court, I understood something I hadn’t in eighth grade.
Against those younger kids, I had been the unfair advantage.
Against Mike, he was.
I’ve been reminiscing about those times recently. Not thinking about basketball. Thinking about fairness.
A different type of court brought that word into the national conversation last week, and almost instantly, everyone seemed certain they knew exactly what it meant.
It caught my attention because I’d heard it being used against me. In eighth grade, I was told I made the game unfair. A year later, I heard the same about Mike Munchak. Neither of us had cheated. Neither of us had broken a rule. We simply arrived on basketball courts with bodies that were different than everyone else's.
It happens every day.
Parents worry that someone else’s advantage will cost their child a starting position, a college scholarship, or maybe even the professional career they are certain is waiting. (It's not.) So, they want that obstacle removed.
What they don’t realize is that they will never level the playing field. There is always another advantage waiting. Remove the tallest player and someone else is quicker. Remove speed and someone else is stronger. Remove strength and someone else sees the game better.
It's never fair. But neither is the word.
Most words aren't
Fairness. Merit. Justice. Freedom. Equality. Leadership. Innovation. Culture.
They’re useful words. But also dangerous because they often become substitutes for the thinking they’re meant to inspire.
We stop turning them over in our heads. We stop looking underneath them. We forget to ask what we mean by them, where they fit, where they don’t, and whether they are carrying more weight than a single word was ever meant to carry.
Sometimes the smallest words ask us to do the biggest thinking.
Like fair.
We divide athletes by age because we believe that makes competition fairer. We divide them by sex and gender for the same reason. Some sports divide competitors by weight, others by skill, disability, or experience.
None of those systems creates a level playing field.
They simply reflect our judgment about which differences matter and which ones don’t.
My eighth-grade opponents wouldn't tell you the field was level. Nor would those who had to go up against Mike Munchak.
The order created to make life fair is an illusion. It always has been.
I’ve written before about the importance of asking better questions. That’s what granularity is. It’s the discipline of resisting the first explanation long enough to discover a better one.
Culture. Leadership. Innovation. Diversity. Inclusion. Trust. Strategy. Fairness
We say the word, nod as though we understand one another, and move on.
But just as there has never been a perfectly level playing field, there has never been a perfectly complete word.
Words, especially those we build decisions around, shouldn’t end important conversations. They should begin them. The moment one word feels like an answer, it’s time to ask another question.
It's only fair.