Durocher’s Law
Nice guys finish last.
This is the popular, highly distilled version of what Brooklyn Dodger baseball manager Leo ‘the Lip’ Durocher said on July 5th, 1946 about the New York Giants. Explaining to a group of sportswriters why one had to be tough to be a winner like his own first-place Dodgers, Durocher directed the attention of the scribes to the enemy dugout across the diamond.
“Look over there,” he said. “Do you know a nicer guy than [Giants' manager Mel] Ott? Or any of the other Giants? Why they are the nicest guys in the world! And where are they? In seventh place.”
The “seventh place” quickly was converted in the popular mind to “last place”, the Giants finishing eighth that year. Durocher protested initially when the “last place” version of the quote was attributed to him, according to Ralph Keyes’s Nice Guys Finish Last, but eventually grew tired of making denials. He entitled his 1975 autobiography Nice Guys Finish Last and changed the wording of the quote in the book to conform more closely to what most people thought thought he had said:
“I called off his players’ names as they came marching up the steps behind him. ‘Walker Cooper Mize Marshall Kerr Gordon Thomson. Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.”
The ‘nice guys’ had a measure of revenge however. Although finishing in the cellar - the sub-basement really, thirty-six games out of first - they managed to beat the league-leading Dodgers on the last day of the season, forcing them into a play-off with the St. Louis Cardinals which the Cards won 2-0.
Permutations of Durocher’s Law:
The First Rule of Public Speaking
Nice guys finish fast
(Reader’s Digest, June 1976).
Kelley’s Law
Last guys don’t finish nice
(Princeton professor Stanford Kelley referring to the bitterness of political campaigns, as quoted by Alan L. Otten in the Wall Street Journal, February 26th 1976).
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