In my mind, Notre Dame seemed like a far-off kingdom. As far away as heaven. The very idea of it was lofty and illustrious, almost mystical, certainly mysterious. For all of those reasons, the school and the football team resonated more like a fairy tale than something that could be found here on earth.
Because of my interest in football, and partially because my dad was so excited to finally have a boy old enough to play, I wound up attending the very same high school my dad went to. I could have gone to the brand-spanking-new Catholic school, Providence High (where all of my younger siblings would go), that had just been built across town, but when dad found out they were offering soccer instead of a football program, he marched me right in to see the priests at Joliet Catholic, housed in a big old brick building that used to be called De La Salle High School back when my dad attended.
Football was a major part of Joliet culture, in that “Friday Night Lights” way. High school teams played every Friday during the season (yes, under the lights) at Joliet Memorial Stadium on West Jefferson Street, the main road through town that’s otherwise dotted with car dealerships and shopping centers. Traffic would back up with all the spectators trying to get in. And when our team won, Joliet Catholic would shine a light in the school’s tower, basically the highest point in all of Joliet, since the school sits atop The Hill district. You could see that beacon for miles.
As the district name suggests, that old, somewhat ornate brick school was located at the crest of a hill right up off the west bank of the Joliet River, a stinky, polluted body of water that cut along the edge of downtown, which itself was sliced up by the overlapping, intersecting railroad tracks that dominate the landscape, some sweeping people in and out of Joliet Union Station and some carrying freight and coal. As we got older, we’d go cruising in that downtown area just past the school grounds, checking out all of the girls who seemed perfectly happy to walk around and be checked out. When we were fortunate enough to have saved some money from a car-washing job or mowing lawns (a dollar a day, if we were lucky), maybe we’d buy a movie ticket and catch a show at the beautiful old Rialto Theater, diagonally across from the library where we’d sometimes come to study. And, of course, every kid dreamed that someday they might have their name and picture painted on the side of the big train trestle, which someone turned into a “wall of fame” for Joliet athletes. (Interestingly enough, flashing forward a few decades, my brother Francis’s picture is up there. He became a renowned weight-lifting champ. My picture is not. I’m not a champion athlete at all. And I’m okay with that. I’m great with it, actually! More on that later . . . )
Like any big town divided by tracks, there was a good side of the tracks and a bad side of the tracks in Joliet. It’s something that persists to this day. The south side is some pretty rough territory, ripe with crime and poverty. And it’s down past that bad side of town, just over the line into the town of Rockdale, where the power plants rise up like concrete cities, looming over the landscape, letting young men know there’s a job waiting right there when they get out of school.
School for me didn’t get any easier as I entered high school. In fact, I pushed back against learning even more than I had as a young kid, with good reason. Before I was enrolled, the school’s principal, an educated Carmelite priest who was widely respected in Joliet and beyond, took one look at my entrance exams and told my father, “We’ve got to put your son in slower learning classes. Your son’s not that smart.” He said it in the office while I sat right there, and he said it in such a way that it sounded to me like an unalterable fact. To tell my parents in private would have been one thing, but to say it in front of me like that? It hurt. It made me angry. And when you’re told you’re “not that smart” by an authority figure with that much power and influence, why wouldn’t you believe it? It’s no different than my father telling me my ears would fall off in church. When someone you look up to speaks, you tend to listen. You tend to take it in. And that can cause a whole world of hurt, which those authority figures may not even realize they’re laying on you.
I don’t blame that priest; in the same way I don’t blame my parents. They weren’t purposefully trying to hurt me. He wasn’t doing it to be mean-spirited (at least I don’t think he was). There simply wasn’t the same sort of awareness of kids’ feelings in those days that we have today, and speaking frankly about the rigors and expectations of education right in front of the child in question was just the way things were done in those schools.
The real problem comes after those words are spoken and a plan is put into action. Then the hurt gets worse. They put you in the slow classes, which leads to you getting picked on and made fun of, which leads to all kinds of self-esteem problems. Heck, I’d carry a science book in my hands on the way to wood shop so the other kids wouldn’t know where I was going. I never understood this whole elite system of learning that teachers professed. How could I have any kind of a self-image when teachers all made it clear that the smart kids went to college? It confused me. No one ever pointed out the fact that we need good woodworkers, good electricians, good mechanics. It was downright embarrassing to be placed in shop class while everyone else studied science and math and set their sights on various universities. Why couldn’t they have focused on my strengths? Focused on the stuff I knew how to do? Showed me how to make a career out of that? How to be inspired to learn more, rather than forced to learn less? I would sit there and cry my eyes out at times. “Why can’t I learn?” It would just destroy me. And what does that lead to? Nothing but problems.
I wound up hanging with a tough crowd in high school—a group of guys who were reckless, who liked to get into fights. It gave me a sense of belonging, in that other students looked up to me, or feared me. I was one of the “bad boys” who would head down the hill by the Joliet River after school and get into a brawl with some kids from another school, usually from the south side of the tracks. There were probably only two handfuls of real fights I participated in, but two handfuls is a lot in four years!
Amazingly, my fighting rarely got me into trouble. I was scrappy and usually won. I came home looking no more beat up than I might have after a hard football practice. A black eye. Swollen knuckles. Yes, I played that hard! Football was an outlet for my pent-up aggressions, just like fighting. So mom and dad never noticed.
Strangely enough, the one time my dad intervened, he saved my life.
The guys I hung around with the most were named George and Ralph. Ralph was probably my best friend. We were both short and shared a similar sense of humor. I could pick on him, and he could pick on me, and it didn’t mean anything ’cause we were so much alike. It was the essence of great camaraderie. I liked his family too, and so did my mother, who rightly didn’t approve of too many of my friends in those days. Of course, none of them realized what a risk-taker Ralph was. He was just a real reckless guy, especially when it came to driving.
There was this one kid we hung around with junior year, a guy we all called Big Nick. And Big Nick got into a lot more fights than I did. Probably for many of the same reasons: he was a smart guy, but had problems. He didn’t fit in. He wasn’t a good student. It’s the same cycle with almost every one of these types of kids, right?
One day Big Nick got drawn into a fight with a gang from another school. The whole thing was set up ahead of time, and he wanted me to come join him. “Come on! Let’s go fight these guys! I’ll pick you up!” he said. I couldn’t tell my dad I was going out to get in a gang fight, of course, so I tried to sneak out of the house that particular night, and my dad caught me coming out of the window. For some reason, he happened to be right outside my window fixing something on the house when I stuck my butt out there.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Nowhere,” I answered.
“Get yourself back in that house, right now!”
Big Nick went ahead without me. I remember sitting in school the next day when word started to get around. Somewhere in the middl
e of that brawl, another kid hit Nick in the head with a rock. Nick was dead. I sat there stunned, not only in sadness at the thought that this guy I palled around with—and was just hanging out with the day before—was gone. Actually gone. But I was also stunned by the simple fact that it could have been me. I could have died too. If my dad hadn’t been in the right place at the right time, my life could have ended right there. All because I was sneaking around and doing stuff I knew darn well I shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.
If a sudden death isn’t enough to stop you in your tracks, I’m not sure what is. But it didn’t stop me. I kept hanging around the same crowd. I’d still go out cruising with George and Ralph, getting into whatever trouble we could find. By trouble, I mean like the time we got caught egging George’s girlfriend’s house. It was pretty innocent stuff for the most part. They were both good guys from good families. They really were. But we were all just filled with so much of that teenage angst, or whatever you want to call it. I guess it’s to be expected. I wasn’t old enough or experienced enough to pay attention to the signs that God was putting right in front of me.
Since my freshman year, my family had been living in a much bigger (close to 1,200 square-foot) split-level house that my dad and his partners built at 808 South Brigg—less than a mile up the road from the St. Mary Magdalene school, which made for an easier walk for my younger brothers and sisters than I had in my early years. It was a modest house with enough room for all of us kids to stretch out a bit. But it existed in a constant state of construction for many years—there were no doors or windows when we first moved in. That’s just how my dad operated. All the boys hunkered down in the specially built bunk room on the lower level. The noise, the craziness, the quiet dinners—everything we had established in our previous house continued as it had, but just a little bit bigger. With more than an acre of land to ourselves, we were able to stretch our activities outside more than ever before, including great pickup baseball games and home-run derbies that dad would organize off on the side lawn. (A side lawn! Imagine that!)
With fourteen kids, there was always something nefarious going on. My mother was always catching my older sisters sneaking in or out of the house, so she was pretty well practiced before she turned that same attention to my brothers and me.
Money was still tight, so when it came to things like haircuts, my dad would just line us all up in the kitchen, hold our heads down, and buzz it all off. He wasn’t exactly a gentle man when it came to working with tools, including that barber’s trimmer, so we all wound up with nicks and cuts all over our heads and would wear baseball caps for days just to cover the ugliness.
My mom would shop for our suits at Sears & Roebuck, and we’d be lucky to get a new comb and a tube of Vitalis for Christmas. We’d get new underwear for Christmas too, which always turned into a challenge: all of us brothers would wind up losing our underwear or running out, not having a pair when we needed it, so we’d steal each other’s perfectly pressed and folded skivvies when no one was looking. It became a regular routine. I’d go to put a pair on and they’d get stuck going up my leg because somehow I wound up with one of my little brothers’ drawers in my drawer! It was a pain.
All those growing boys in the house also made food a big challenge. My mom continued to cook big meals, but we were never satisfied. We were always hungry and always snacking, which drove mom nuts. In fact, she wound up hiding food in her bedroom closet just so us boys wouldn’t steal it.
The challenge of handling all of us Ruettiger boys extended beyond home as well. In school, teachers started losing track of who was who from year to year. As time went on, they just seemed to give up. They’d just call us by our last name: “Hey, Ruettiger!” Then even that seemed to be too much of a verbal burden, so our teachers, our peers, our coaches—everyone—just shortened our name down to “Rudy.” All seven of us, for the rest of our lives, would be “Rudy” to just about everyone outside of family.
Oddly enough, within our family, we came up with a different shared nickname for each other: “coach.” I’m not sure how or why that started, but I call my brothers coach, I called my dad coach, and they call me coach whenever we pick up the phone or if we’re gathered around at one of their houses. “Hey coach, grab me another beer will you?” Whichever brother it’s directed at, they respond to it. I like to think of it as a sign of respect. After all, you’re supposed to respect a coach, right?
My dad had funny nicknames for everyone too. Mine was “wise guy.” For a lot of those years, I always had a comeback or an argument or a complaint about everything my dad ever suggested. I always put up a verbal fight or gave him a little lip. Like a lot of teens, I thought I had all the answers, always thought I knew better. So he just started calling me “wise guy,” and it stuck for many, many years.
One night during senior year, I had plans to hit the town with my buddies Ralph and George. Ralph was driving, and he was always late, but I remember sitting there waiting and waiting on him, a lot longer than usual that night. I finally called Ralph’s house to see if anyone knew what was taking him so long, and his dad picked up. “You haven’t heard, have you, Rudy?” he said. His voice was real shaky.
“Heard what?” I asked.
“Ralph is dead.”
I lost my breath.
“What?” I asked.
I couldn’t believe it.
He’d been in a car accident on the way to my house. He apparently had tried to pass another car in a no-passing zone, the same kind of reckless stuff he’d done ever since he got his license. We’d be in the car and he’d be swerving back and forth across the yellow line, and we’d tell him, “You’re gonna get killed someday, man!”
This was that someday.
I may have missed the sign from God that first time around, but this time it hit me like a bullet in the back. After two big warnings, it finally registered: I gotta change. I gotta get away from this. I’m hanging around with the wrong people. I’m not focused on the right stuff in life. Not that George or Ralph or Big Nick were bad guys. They weren’t. Not at all. They were good friends. All of them. Good people. They had just spent too much time drowning in the negativity of a school system that neglects kids who don’t fit the perfect mold, and the boatloads of other pressures society puts on its youth—the exact same way I had. For some reason, I’d managed to survive. I was thankful. I was hurt. I was shocked. I didn’t understand it. But when I got off the phone with Ralph’s dad, I knew I was done with that life.
Going to Ralph’s funeral was the most surreal and profound moment of my life up to that point. It felt almost like it wasn’t happening. I still felt like Ralph was walking around somewhere. I could still hear his voice. It was freaky.
There were no more fights for me after that. Whatever anger and frustration I had been releasing through my fists got stuffed back down inside, where it belonged.
Funny thing, though: even then, at that still-young age, I had a feeling it would find another way out.
Football really was my salvation in high school. For some kids it’s art. For some it’s music. For me, it was strapping on those pads, yanking that helmet over my head, and getting out there with the team. I was relentless on the field, especially my senior year. My teachers always complained that I was untrainable or uncoachable in my academic pursuits because I refused to do things their way; in fact, I wasn’t capable of doing things their way, and yet out on that football field the coaches usually loved me because I got out there and played as hard as I could. Head coach Gordon Gillespie made every player feel like he was a part of the team. I looked up to him in a big way. He made every one of us believe we could accomplish great things on that field. He inspired me to put it all on the line in every practice and every game. It’s as if all of my aggression was channeled into playing. I took hits like no one else. I got the sense some of the big guys wanted to see how hard of a hit I could take, and there was never a hit that kept me down. I always came back for m
ore. Same way I did in those fights down by the river. Always. My drive went right back to what my dad told me on the baseball field: “Just keep playing hard.” That made sense to me. We were all in this together, and there was no way I would allow myself to be a weak link in any other players’ eyes.
Football is different from baseball. You’re not alone at any point, never standing at a plate with the pressure solely on you. You’re truly a part of something, from start to finish. Wherever your effort ends, someone else’s begins. It’s a game full of moving parts; all of those parts have to work together, and every part of the machine is equally important (despite what some quarterbacks think). Every single person has a role to play, and you have to play it well if you ever want a shot at winning.
I liked that.
I also have to admit I liked that feeling of being out there under the lights on Friday nights. All those people cheering. You were somebody when you were on that team. A big shot. People paid attention. And to a kid who wasn’t used to being paid much attention to in school, that filled me with a sense of pride.
It didn’t seem to matter that I wasn’t the tallest (I stopped growing at just around five feet six inches) or the fastest or the strongest on the team. As long as I played hard and played my part, I basked in the glory of those wins just as much as every other player. As much as I floundered in school, I excelled on the field and was rewarded accordingly. I was All-Conference Guard and All-Conference Linebacker. Nothing could stop me!
I loved the game so much. I’d go practice or join in pick-up games even when I wasn’t supposed to. One time, I convinced my mom to let me borrow her car. She kept saving those nickels and finally had a car of her own, a Buick Skylark, and she wouldn’t let anyone else drive it. But on this day, I convinced her that I really, really needed to go downtown to the library to study—and she gave in. Imagine her surprise when I called her a few hours later from the hospital with a broken collarbone. “I thought you were at the library!” she yelled. I couldn’t drive back. She had to arrange to have a friend bring her to the hospital so she could take me (and her car) back home. Well, by the time we got there, my dad was home from work and had heard the whole story. My little brothers still recall the fear they had for me as I walked into that living room to face him. He was so mad! I felt like a fool, of course, for lying. But I wanted to play football every chance I got. On this occasion, I took a shot and lost.
Rudy Page 4