Scoring Points on the Side: Fair or Not?

I overheard a colleague say once that his basketball skills had paid dividends in his academic career.

In graduate school, he had discovered that the department chair and several other significant faculty members played lunchtime pickup games. So he landed an invitation and ended up playing almost daily with most of the members of his dissertation committee. He found a similar situation in his first tenure-track job, playing with several leaders on the campus, including his department chair and the dean, who became friends as well as supervisors.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with golf, community-service organizations, and other extracurricular activities, in which a faculty or staff member forms relationships with important persons through nonacademic interests. I’ve been told by such insiders that it is simply a part of collegiality — but there are times when I wonder if that’s not really just code for the “good-old-boy/girl network.”

Have you ever seen these kinds of off-campus relationships become unfair?