Motivation Quote by Curt Flood

There’s a quiet punch in Flood’s phrasing: not “if I got traded,” but “if I were ever traded,” as if the act were a distant hypothetical rather than an ordinary feature of employment. Then the next clause snaps the illusion in half: “because it happened many, many times.” The sentence performs the very contradiction he lived under - a man treated like property trying to speak in the grammar of choice.

Flood isn’t romanticizing loyalty or complaining about a bad break. He’s revealing the psychological tax of a system where movement is routine but agency is absent. The repetition of “many, many” isn’t rhetorical flourish so much as a weary insistence: you don’t get to process a trade as a singular event when it keeps happening; you train yourself to anticipate dispossession. That’s the subtext - preemptive self-management as survival, the athlete running contingency plans for his own life because others keep rewriting it.

The context makes the line sharper. Flood, a star center fielder, became the face of the fight against MLB’s reserve clause after being traded to Philadelphia in 1969. He refused to report, arguing he wasn’t a piece on an owner’s chessboard, and took on baseball’s labor regime at enormous personal cost. So the “wondered what would I do” isn’t idle reflection; it’s a setup for the moment he finally answered: he’d say no. The quote captures that hinge point where resignation turns into resolve, and where a private anxiety becomes a public challenge to an industry’s preferred fiction - that trades are just “business” and not a statement about who gets to be human.