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Motivation Quote by Lee Trevino

"Pressure is playing for ten dollars when you don't have a dime in your pocket"

About this Quote

Pressure, Lee Trevino suggests, isn’t a roaring crowd or a final-round leaderboard. It’s arithmetic. Ten dollars on the line when you don’t have a dime turns a game into a survival exercise, where the stakes aren’t abstract pride but a very real gap between what you need and what you’ve got.

The intent is to puncture the glamorous mythology around athletic “clutch” moments. Trevino, a working-class kid who shined shoes and grew up with financial scarcity, reframes stress as something you learn long before a TV camera finds you. In that light, golf’s genteel image gets quietly upended: for many, it’s not leisure, it’s livelihood. When you’re broke, every swing carries the weight of rent, food, dignity. That’s pressure.

The subtext has bite. He’s not just claiming toughness; he’s calling out a common misreading of adversity. Plenty of people with stable safety nets confuse discomfort with danger. Trevino’s line draws a hard boundary: pressure begins when consequences are non-negotiable and immediate, when failure isn’t a lesson but a loss you can’t absorb.

It also explains his persona - the wisecracking, unpretentious anti-snob in a sport that often polices class through etiquette and access. By anchoring “pressure” to money you don’t have, he makes a broader cultural argument: resilience isn’t an attitude you download; it’s a skill forged when there’s no cushion. Golf, in Trevino’s telling, becomes a stage where class anxiety plays through a quiet, brutal economy of swings.

Quote Details

TopicStress
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Trevino, Lee. (n.d.). Pressure is playing for ten dollars when you don't have a dime in your pocket. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/pressure-is-playing-for-ten-dollars-when-you-dont-160473/

Chicago Style
Trevino, Lee. "Pressure is playing for ten dollars when you don't have a dime in your pocket." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/pressure-is-playing-for-ten-dollars-when-you-dont-160473/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Pressure is playing for ten dollars when you don't have a dime in your pocket." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/pressure-is-playing-for-ten-dollars-when-you-dont-160473/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Lee Trevino (born December 1, 1939) is a Athlete from USA.

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