A hundred years of borrowing

Most claims about this passage are third-hand: a story about a locker room, a story about a coach. This page keeps only what traces to a transcript, a press release, a photograph or a filed document, and marks the rest. The verified record is the more interesting one anyway: it exposes a pattern of editing nobody borrowing the passage admits to.

8 August 1974: the resignation

Nixon announced his resignation at nine in the evening, from the Oval Office, to tens of millions. Near the end he reached for Roosevelt, and the introduction is careful: he claims no victory, only heart.

“Sometimes I have succeeded and sometimes I have failed, but always I have taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, ‘whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again because there is not effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deed, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.’”— Richard Nixon, address to the nation, 8 August 1974, as transcribed by the American Presidency Project

Notice what is missing: a subject. Roosevelt's sentence runs “It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred…” Nixon drops the attack on the critic and the clause naming who gets the credit, and starts at the dust and the blood. He stops at “daring greatly” — before “cold and timid souls”, before Hotspur, before everything. Three mistranscriptions ride along: “there is not effort”, “the deed” for “the deeds”, “triumphs of high achievements” for “the triumph of high achievement”. The most-watched borrowing in American history was a wounded fragment.

Next morning Nixon quoted Roosevelt again to the White House staff — but not this passage. He read the diary written after the death of Roosevelt's first wife (“when my heart's dearest died, the light went from my life forever”), then added: “That was T.R. in his twenties… but he went on.” The 9 August farewell is a Roosevelt speech, not an arena speech. The two are routinely conflated.

The presidential record

Searching the American Presidency Project for Roosevelt's exact phrase “actually in the arena” returns the 1910 address and six later presidential documents, all full transcripts — as close to a clean dataset as the subject offers.

Franklin Roosevelt, 2 November 1936, closing his re-election campaign by radio, quotes his cousin at greater length than any other president on record — the passage as reward for having “been a part of great things”. He still cuts “because there is no effort without error and shortcoming”, and ends on “souls who know neither defeat nor victory”, the order reversed.

John F. Kennedy, 5 December 1961, at the National Football Foundation banquet in New York: the earliest verified sporting use, and it comes from a president, not a coach. Kennedy cuts the opening entirely — no critic, no stumbling strong man — and adds a phrase Roosevelt never wrote, “who at best if he wins knows the thrills of high achievement”.

Lyndon Johnson, twice in 1967 — the White House Fellows on 1 May, the Capitol Page School graduation on 13 June. Both are ellipsised to about forty words, both end at “neither victory nor defeat”, both address young people entering public service.

Barack Obama, twice in July 2016. At a Charlotte fundraiser on 5 July he uses the phrase unattributed. At the convention on 27 July he credits Roosevelt and compresses the passage to twenty words:

“That's what happens when you're the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described: not the timid souls who criticize from the sidelines, but someone ‘who is actually in the arena . . . who strives valiantly; who errs . . . but who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement.’ Hillary Clinton is that woman in the arena.”— Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention, 27 July 2016

That is the most aggressive reworking on the list. Obama turns “cold and timid souls” into “timid souls who criticize from the sidelines” — not Roosevelt's phrase — then overrides the gender with “that woman in the arena”. Roosevelt's paragraph does not permit that reading; see critiques and misreadings.

Nixon is absent from that search only because his transcript reads “the man in the arena”. He remains the politician most identified with the phrase. APM Reports' history of the 1968 campaign says Roger Ailes's staged television question-and-answer programmes were called “Man in the Arena”; the Nixon Foundation calls the same broadcasts “The Nixon Answer”, and the record does not settle it. His 1990 memoir In the Arena carries the passage as its epigraph. The Foundation also reports he reached for it after losing the 1962 California governor's race — an institutional claim, not a transcript.

Locker rooms and lockers

The sporting afterlife is real, but thinner in the sourcing than the volume of retelling suggests. Three instances hold up.

• LeBron James, October 2010. ESPN's Brian Windhorst reported on 29 October 2010 that James had posted the passage “in large print” in his locker, in his first Miami season, after the criticism that followed his move. That report is the origin of the “LeBron and the Heat era” story, and it establishes something narrow: a printout in one locker, one season, with no quotation from James about it. Retellings that put the passage on the Heat's wall, with the 2012–13 championship team, or on his shoes go beyond it, and are not repeated here.
• Mark DeRosa, 11 October 2012. Before Game 4 of the National League Division Series the Nationals' utility infielder took the clubhouse microphone and read the passage to the team. The Associated Press covered it next day with DeRosa on the record: “Our backs were against the wall. I wanted to say something that brought us together, a band of brothers who go out fighting and see what happens.” Washington won on a Jayson Werth walk-off. Named player, named game, wire report, direct quotes — the best-documented locker-room use on record.
• Tom Brady, 2021–22. ESPN+ released a ten-part series titled Man in the Arena: Tom Brady, from 16 November 2021 to 25 April 2022. ESPN's own press releases verify the title and the dates.

Two things could not be sourced: college programmes with the passage on a wall or a tunnel, everywhere in blog posts and nowhere in a citable report; and boxing and MMA, where there are posters and merchandise but no named fighter on record. Both are probably real. Neither is established here.

A warship, a shareholder letter, a graduation

Outside sport the passage turns up wherever an institution wants to pre-empt criticism of itself.

Military. A US Navy photograph dated 30 March 2008 shows a bronze plaque of the passage on the quarterdeck of the cruiser USS Port Royal (CG 73) — an official image with a caption and a named photographer, rather than the usual claim that “it hangs in military academies”.

Corporate. The best corporate document is RH's fiscal-2024 fourth-quarter shareholder letter, filed as an exhibit to the results. Chairman and CEO Gary Friedman quotes the passage at length under the heading “Every movement has a lunatic fringe”, then closes: “If it means, as President Roosevelt said in his speech at the Sorbonne, that ‘our place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat,’ then put us in that arena.” This is the poster in its natural habitat, and it is revealing. Friedman rewrites as he goes: “the man” becomes “the man or woman”, Roosevelt's 226-word sentence becomes twelve short ones, and “his place” becomes “our place” — so the company is the man in the arena. A quotation deployed against critics, quietly edited to fit.

Commencement. Johnson's Page School remarks are the archetype, and say the quiet part out loud: the graduates have “learned the political realities”, Roosevelt is quoted, and then — “That knowledge gives you a head start in life.”

What everybody cuts

The arena paragraph runs 385 words in the 1910 Scribner printing. The famous part — “It is not the critic” to “neither victory nor defeat” — is 141 of them. The remaining 244, nearly two-thirds, are almost never reproduced. No verified use on this page goes past “victory nor defeat”; most stop earlier.

What is in the missing 244 words? Shame on the man of cultivated taste whose refinement becomes fastidiousness. A small field of usefulness for men of cloistered life. Less room for those who deride what others do, none for those who would act “if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are”. The cynic, the fop and the voluptuary, all cutting the same sordid figure. Then Hotspur, war-worn and spent, preferred to the courtier who “but for the vile guns would have been a soldier”. The full paragraph is not a consolation for failure; it is a sustained attack on four kinds of non-participant — aesthete, recluse, sneerer, excuse-maker — ending in a Shakespeare reference most readers miss. Cut all that and what remains is a hug. Read it whole in the transcript, or clause by clause in the close reading.

A second layer of drift sits on top: almost every circulating copy follows the Wikisource wording rather than the 1910 print — “who neither know victory nor defeat” for “who know neither victory nor defeat”, and nine further differences. Both the 2012 AP report and the RH letter use the Wikisource order. The close reading lists them all.

Plaques, prints and tattoos

The passage has an object life: engraved plaques, framed prints, wallet cards and notebooks, sold in quantity on Etsy, Amazon and Zazzle. That much is observable. Data is not — nobody publishes how many arena prints sell in a year, and any page offering a number has invented it. The merchandise is abundant; the evidence about its scale is anecdotal.

Tattoos are the same, with one hard case attached. In October 2012 several outlets, HuffPost among them, reported that Liam Hemsworth had tattooed “if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly” on his forearm to match a fragment Miley Cyrus had inked earlier that year, the two meant to be read in sequence. That is a reported celebrity instance, not a measurement. The claim that this is one of the most-tattooed quotations in English rests on nothing published.

The “Roosevelt carried it” stories

A family of claims holds that Roosevelt kept the passage on his person — folded in a pocket, tucked in a wallet, carried for courage. A search for a primary source produces nothing: no letter, diary entry, inventory or contemporary report puts the arena text in his pocket, and the Theodore Roosevelt Center makes no such claim.

What almost certainly seeded the story is a real event involving a different speech. On 14 October 1912, campaigning in Milwaukee, Roosevelt was shot in the chest by John Schrank. The bullet passed through his steel spectacle case and a fifty-page manuscript folded once in his breast pocket, and lodged without reaching the lung. He delivered the speech anyway, and its opening lines are the evidence: “fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through.” The manuscript was “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual”, not “Citizenship in a Republic”. Roosevelt was saved by a speech in his pocket. It was not this one.

One related claim, with its uncertainty attached: the Sorbonne text was printed in Paris as a pocket booklet within days, and Mental Floss reports it sold five thousand copies in five days. That figure could not be traced to a 1910 source — reported, not established. The printing itself is not in doubt. The passage was portable from the start, just not in Roosevelt's own coat.

Timeline

Why this paragraph and not another

Across the whole 1910 volume of Roosevelt's African and European addresses — six major speeches, 337,000 characters — the word “arena” appears exactly once, and “daring greatly” exactly once. Both are here. Whatever made this passage travel is local to these 385 words.

Four properties explain most of it. It is short enough to memorise and long enough to feel substantial — 141 words is a poster, a plaque, a forearm, a slide. It fragments cleanly. Nearly every clause survives extraction: “the man in the arena”, “dust and sweat and blood”, “daring greatly”, “cold and timid souls”. Two people can tattoo consecutive fragments and each still works — the passage is built from parallel who-clauses and comes apart along the seams (see the machinery of the sentence).

It flatters whoever quotes it. Saying it aloud puts the speaker in the arena and everyone listening in the stands. Obama gave it to Hillary Clinton; a furniture retailer gave it to itself; a resigning president gave it to himself before the country removing him. It is a self-assigning medal.

And it is most useful to people who have just lost. Nixon quoted it the night he resigned. Kennedy quoted it to men whose careers were half made of losing. DeRosa read it facing elimination. James pinned it up after a season of being booed. RH quoted it in a letter the market disliked. Roosevelt wrote it eighteen months out of office and two years before losing an election he had split his own party to enter. It is not about winning. It is prepared language for the moment after a loss, when a person most needs an account of what happened that they can live with. Which explains the 244 vanished words too: the ending attacks other people, and someone who has just lost needs a defence of himself. Whether that defence is honest, or a way of never hearing a critic again, is page 07 and page 11.

Sources for this page

• Nixon, “Address to the Nation Announcing Decision to Resign” — American Presidency Project, 8 August 1974 · the full transcript, from which the exact wording and the exact truncation of Nixon's quotation are taken.
• The same speech at the Miller Center — University of Virginia · independent transcript, used to confirm the wording; also carries audio.
• Nixon, farewell remarks to the White House staff, 9 August 1974 — The History Place · establishes that the 9 August remarks quote Roosevelt's diary on his wife's death, not the arena passage.
• F. D. Roosevelt, final campaign radio speech, 2 November 1936 — American Presidency Project · the longest presidential quotation of the passage on record, and the reversed “defeat nor victory” ending.
• Kennedy at the National Football Foundation banquet, 5 December 1961 — American Presidency Project · the earliest verified sporting use; note “the thrills of high achievement”, which is not Roosevelt's phrase.
• Johnson to the White House Fellows, 1 May 1967 and at the Capitol Page School graduation, 13 June 1967 — American Presidency Project · both heavily ellipsised.
• Obama at the Democratic National Convention, 27 July 2016 and at a Charlotte fundraiser, 5 July 2016 — American Presidency Project · the twenty-word version and the unattributed phrase.
• Brian Windhorst, “LeBron, Teddy Roosevelt and criticism” — ESPN, 29 October 2010 · establishes the printout in the locker in the 2010–11 season; does not establish anything about later Heat seasons, shoes or walls.
• “Before Werth's walkoff homer… a rousing speech” — Associated Press via Fox News, 12 October 2012 · the DeRosa clubhouse reading, with direct quotes; also shows the AP reproducing the Wikisource wording.
• “Man in the Arena” (US Navy photograph) — DVIDS, 30 March 2008 · the bronze plaque on the quarterdeck of USS Port Royal; a documented military instance rather than a generalisation.
• RH fourth-quarter and fiscal-2024 shareholder letter (PDF) — RH · the corporate use in a filed document, including the de-gendered rewrite and “then put us in that arena”.
• “Man in the Arena: Tom Brady to Debut Exclusively on ESPN+” — ESPN Press Room, November 2021 · establishes the title and the release dates, nothing about Brady's own relationship to the text.
• “Campaign '68: Richard Nixon” — APM Reports · names the staged 1968 television Q&A programmes “Man in the Arena”; contradicted on the name by the Nixon Foundation, which calls them “The Nixon Answer”.
• “RN and TR: Always in the Arena” — Richard Nixon Foundation, 14 October 2014 · the source for the 1962 claim and for the passage as the epigraph of In the Arena; an institutional account, not a transcript.
• “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual” — Roosevelt, Milwaukee, 14 October 1912, via Wikisource · Roosevelt's own account of the manuscript that stopped the bullet; establishes that the speech in his pocket was not the Sorbonne address.
• “The Man in the Arena” — Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickinson State University · the speech text and its setting; notably makes no claim that Roosevelt carried the passage.
• Erin McCarthy, “Roosevelt's ‘The Man in the Arena’” — Mental Floss · a useful index of claimed borrowings, several of which this page could not confirm and therefore does not repeat.
• African and European Addresses — Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910 · the printed text this map treats as canonical, and the source of the word-frequency counts above.