Leadership Quote by Herb Kohl

Sports officiating is supposed to be the neutral infrastructure of competition, yet Herb Kohl leans into the inconvenient truth every fan already mutters at the TV: the game changes depending on who’s holding the whistle. His line works because it’s not really about baseball strike zones or how tightly a ref calls hand-checking. It’s about discretion - the human margin inside any system that pretends to be purely objective.

Kohl, a politician, understands that legitimacy often lives or dies in those margins. The subtext is procedural: rules may be written in ink, but they’re enforced in real time by individuals with habits, blind spots, and philosophies. A “wide” strike zone and a “tight” strike zone aren’t just personal quirks; they produce different incentives, reward different styles, and quietly reshape outcomes. In basketball, a whistle-happy crew can turn physical defense into a liability and make a free-throw parade feel like the sport’s least flattering version of itself.

Contextually, this kind of remark fits a lawmaker’s instinct to normalize inconsistency without fully excusing it. It signals realism: stop acting shocked that governance - whether of games or public life - is uneven when administered by people. There’s also a gentle warning embedded in the sports metaphor: if you want fairness, you don’t just argue about “the rules.” You scrutinize the interpreters, the standards they carry, and the accountability that keeps judgment from curdling into arbitrariness.