Motivation Quote by Leo Durocher

Durocher takes a clubhouse cliche - show up, compete, give the fans their money's worth - and flips it into something closer to a threat. "Come to play" is the polite myth sports sells about itself: effort, sportsmanship, clean intention. "Come to kill" is the amoral truth Durocher wanted to reward: dominance so total it makes the opponent feel erased. The shock of that verb does the real work. It turns a merit badge (admiration) into a warning label, announcing that in his universe niceness is a costume and aggression is the only authentic language.

The intent is managerial and performative. Durocher wasn't just describing what he liked; he was licensing a mentality. If you're one of his players, the line grants permission to be ruthless, to treat games as conquest rather than contest, to measure success by psychological damage as much as the scoreboard. It's also a recruiting pitch: winners, especially in mid-century baseball, often got celebrated for their "edge" while the messier ethics got waved off as competitiveness.

The subtext is Durocher's famous credo - "Nice guys finish last" - compressed into a single, brutal escalation. He understood how audiences consume sports: not as craft, but as conflict. By choosing a word associated with war and crime, he collapses the distance between athletic excellence and violence, revealing how thin that boundary can feel when the stakes are status, pride, and profit.