This file is a short single-author polemical sports column. Rothbard’s scope is basketball, soccer, and pro football, but the essay’s broader target is the cultural prestige of defense, balance, and “purism.” Its thesis is blunt: games are better when they reward scoring, offensive imagination, and heroic individual excellence, and worse when rules, referees, and expert opinion permit defensive obstruction to dominate play.
I’m going to say it flat out, and damn the consequences: despite the “purists,” I hate games and teams that emphasize defense.
The opening rejects the standard moral vocabulary of team sports. Rothbard does not admire “unselfish” balance for its own sake; he wants spectacle, risk, and virtuosity. His preferred athletic world is aristocratic rather than egalitarian, organized around brilliant offensive performers rather than systems that suppress them.
What I like and what we see all too little of, are games that stress offense and are studded with heroic superstars.
That aesthetic premise governs the essay’s structure. First comes pro basketball, where the Detroit Pistons become Rothbard’s chief negative example. Their championships matter because winning styles are copied; if a defensive dynasty prevails, the whole league may imitate its methods. Rothbard’s conceptual move is to redescribe “great defense” as legalized interference: not skillful beauty but thuggery enabled by timid officiating.
The “great defense” is, of course, accomplished by thuggery: by physically preventing the offense of the other team from shooting.
Against the Pistons, Michael Jordan functions as the essay’s positive emblem. Rothbard imagines a “just basketball order” in which Jordan’s Bulls would triumph and become the model for imitation. The argument is not merely that Jordan is entertaining; it is that rules and enforcement should let offensive genius become the organizing standard of the game.
To be specific, Michael “Air” Jordan is far and away the greatest basketball player today, and in a just basketball order his Chicago Bulls would have won the championship for the past two years, and future teams would attempt to emulate Jordan rather than the muggers from Detroit.
The second case is soccer, especially the 1990 World Cup. Rothbard treats modern soccer as a historical decline from a more open, higher-scoring form into a defensive stalemate. His complaint is structural: formations and the offside rule allow teams to crowd the back of the field, making attack rare and leads nearly decisive.
A one-goal lead becomes virtually insurmountable.
He therefore proposes rule changes—abolishing offside and limiting defenders in the back third—not as technical tinkering but as a way to restore offensive possibility. The same standard recurs: rules should create space for scoring, not reward massed prevention.
The final section turns to pro football as the hopeful exception. Rothbard praises the modern rise of passing and especially the “run-and-shoot,” a system built around receivers, options, and rapid adaptation. Here defense is not merely disliked; it is intellectually opposed by a more fluid, decentralized offense.
The last couple of decades have seen the triumph of the quarterback and the forward pass: and hence, a satisfyingly explosive and high-scoring offense.
His admiration for the run-and-shoot reveals the essay’s deepest conceptual affinity: Rothbard favors spontaneous adjustment over command planning, finesse over brute force, and creative response over rigid design.
In contrast to orthodox strategies where the coach spells out the precise details of each play in advance, the five key players react quickly and on the spot to whatever defense is put up against them.
The column’s relevance lies in showing Rothbard’s libertarian sensibility translated into sports criticism: suspicion of experts, impatience with collectivist virtue-talk, attention to incentives and rule enforcement, and admiration for entrepreneurial brilliance. Its rhetoric is deliberately abrasive, including harsh urban and cultural jabs, but its central pattern is consistent: defense is associated with coercion, boredom, and obstruction, while offense is associated with freedom, excellence, and excitement.
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