“I wanted to be able to look down and see it whenever I was thinking about her, or whatever the case may be,” Murray said. “And I just thought it looked cool, especially the way it sits with the watch.”
Murray then added another tattoo. He keeps it under wraps but shared that it’s on his left bicep and is a reference to an oration given in 1910 by former U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt. The tattoo reads “The Man in the Arena.”
That phrase refers to a part of Roosevelt’s “Citizenship in a Republic” speech that has resonated throughout the years for its message of striving to achieve even while risking failure, versus simply criticizing from the sidelines. The full copy reads:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Murray first learned of the phrase when LeBron James wrote “man in the arena” on his sneakers. Intrigued, he looked up what it meant. The message resonated with him as someone who’s “in the arena frequently.”
