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When There’s Nothing Against It in the Rulebook

In “Marty Supreme,” “Air Bud” and real life — is it unfair to exploit a loophole, or just good strategy?

Sam Corbin

By Sam Corbin

March 13, 2026

In the 1997 movie “Air Bud,” a golden retriever is picked to play for a middle school basketball team, despite rivals’ protests. “Check in your rulebook,” the team’s coach says to the referee. “Bet you won’t find anything in there that says the dog can’t play.” Spoiler alert: He’s right.

This argument, which is sometimes cited as the “Air Bud” rule or defense, has been used to bolster a puckish philosophy of gameplay: If something isn’t explicitly against the rules, it’s implicitly allowed. “Marty Supreme,” a 2025 film by Josh Safdie based on true events, hinges on a similar (albeit less absurd) sidestepping of restrictions. Marty Mauser, a table tennis wunderkind played by Timothée Chalamet, embodying the real-life Marty Reisman, loses a championship game to Koto Endo, a competitor from Japan (based in part on Hiroji Satoh). The victor played with his own paddle made of smooth rubber, not the standard dimpled rubber. Could he do that? Well, there was nothing in the rulebook that said he couldn’t.

Written rules cover only so much: game mechanics, code of conduct, penalties. The rest falls to vibes-based adjudication: You never said dogs couldn’t play basketball. You didn’t say it had to be a dimpled paddle. From an entertainment standpoint, it’s fun to experiment with a Socratic approach to fair play. Why not let the dog play? But it doesn’t square with our morals as competitors.

Part of the seduction of Marty Mauser’s dignity-be-damned, comeback kid story in “Marty Supreme” is his dogged pursuit of a fair fight (even if he hustles, lies and steals to get it). Win or lose, Mauser demands to do so on equal footing — and there might be a science to why we’re all gunning for the rematch.

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Cristina Bicchieri, a professor of social thought and comparative ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, put it this way: If we see ourselves in Mauser, it’s because the desire for shared boundaries of play is a fundamental social norm.

“Every game is a tiny society,” Ms. Bicchieri said, adding that when a player violates the “tacit and spoken agreement” regarding the rules, it creates a miniature societal breakdown. “Even if you care about the rules, you will start playing very defensively,” she said. “Trust will diminish.” Moreover, if someone sees that certain behaviors are tolerated, that player may opt to violate other rules. “I don’t want to be a sucker — I don’t want to be the only person who follows the rules, right?” she said.

Some games treat cheating as a strategy. In baseball, stealing is fair play. On the reality competition show “The Traitors,” contestants lie freely, promising that they aren’t out to get one another, only to turn the tables later. The Guardian described the series as a “cynical celebration of deceit as a life skill.” Such behaviors, Ms. Bicchieri pointed out, can be normalized play, too, because “I trust that you, my opponent, are trying to deceive me.” (You can win any argument that way.)

It may be that the only way to figure out how much — or little — fairness a rulebook can guarantee is to make one. In 2006, Greg Manley, a Pittsburgh-based artist and storyteller, devised a game called Circle Rules Football as a thesis project for his theater degree. The game has evolved over the years into an internationally recognized sport with its own federation (Mr. Manley is commissioner) and regulation equipment.

Mr. Manley likened sports regulation to playwriting. “Because Circle Rules was kind of born out of theater school, I began to associate the rulebook with the script,” he said. “As soon as you want it to be played by other people, you need to have a script that is legible or understandable.”

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Circle Rules Football is played with two teams. Each tries to score a goal from opposite directions through a single goal post, which sits at the center of a circular zone called the “key.” Because there are penalties for touching the ball while inside the key, players have to get creative about how they pass, shoot or block the ball from the goal post. “People’s inner animals come out when they play sports,” Mr. Manley said, adding that any game should have “the element of stupidity and surprise.”

As for the unwritten rules, Mr. Manley thinks big picture. He teaches game invention to middle schoolers and often begins by illustrating two monsters on a whiteboard. One monster represents rules, and the other represents strategy. “In an ideal game, these monsters are equally matched,” he said. Tipping the scale in either direction has consequences for both players and spectators. When rules are too comprehensive, “you end up with a relatively stagnant sport, like bowling.” Leave too much room for strategy, however, and an innovative tactic — like a paddle with its own physics — makes an otherwise exciting game somewhat predictable.

“When it becomes such a powerful innovation,” Mr. Manley said, “then almost everybody needs to adopt that strategy, or the rules need to change to eliminate that strategy, because it makes the game less fun.” Case in exaggerated point: The “Saturday Night Live” sketch about the fake football legend Billy Van Goff (played by Steve Martin), nicknamed “The Gun” because he always brought a gun onto the field. A game official, played by Bill Hader, explains that “Technically, there was no rule against it.”

The problem with establishing fairness is that it is neither technical nor tactical. It’s usually just a real-time judgment call. The World Anti-Doping Agency, which investigates the use of performance-enhancing drugs to cheat in professional sports, refers to fairness writ large as “the spirit of sport.” The agency reserves the right to rule on blurrier infractions — like, say, a recent claim of skiers inflating their penises with hyaluronic acid to make themselves more aerodynamic — with a mind to that spirit. Their list of values within the spirit of sport includes “Ethics, fair play and honesty,” and, notably farther down, “respect for rules and laws.”

The evolution of gameplay is a reactive process. If rulebooks seem to control for the unexpected, it’s only because the unexpected happened. As frustrating as that may be to players on the receiving end, a winning strategy can ultimately only improve the game, because it shows us what’s possible. Will Shortz, the crossword editor for The New York Times who also owns a table tennis club, described the switch to smooth rubber paddles after Reisman’s 1952 championship loss as a bonus. “It made the sport of table tennis faster and more athletic,” Mr. Shortz said.

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The thrill of unpredictability also keeps games fun for people on the sidelines. Major League Baseball recently introduced pitch timers and pickoff limits to make stealing bases easier, chiefly because it makes the game more exciting to watch.

As for Circle Rules, Mr. Manley said that, given the zany theatricality out of which the game was forged, he had not ruled out — and would not — the possibility of an “Air Bud” scenario. “I would love that,” he said, adding, “if a dog played effectively.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1909717&forum_id=2...#49748402)