Leadership Quote by Barney Ross

Luck is doing most of the speaking here, and Barney Ross knows it. The line starts with an almost casual miracle: “I don’t know to this day why we didn’t get struck or take a torpedo.” Coming from a champion boxer turned Marine in World War II, that admission lands harder than bravado ever could. Athletes are supposed to narrate their lives as earned victories. Ross, instead, foregrounds randomness - the chaotic math of survival at sea, where merit means little and timing means everything.

The blunt, workmanlike phrasing (“managed,” “get underway,” “outside of the exit”) reads like someone forcing himself to stay technical because the alternative is emotional. Then the sentence pivots from vulnerability to action: “but we didn’t. We got... and we started dropping depth charges.” It’s a psychological gearshift. The subtext is a coping mechanism: you don’t dwell on the fact you should be dead; you do the next job. Survivors often talk this way, sanding down terror into procedure.

Context sharpens it. Ross volunteered after Pearl Harbor and fought on Guadalcanal, where he reportedly took control of a landing craft and kept it operating under fire, later receiving the Navy Cross. This quote echoes that ethos: not heroic poetry, just a stubborn momentum. It also quietly punctures the myth of the invincible sports hero. In war, even the toughest body is just another target; the only “edge” is what you do in the seconds after you realize chance has spared you.