The newspaper played me up as the ultimate underdog, and boy, does Notre Dame love an underdog. They put me as an odds-on favorite to win the Bengal Bouts the following semester, but that was a long way off. All I cared about that fall was football. It would be my last season. I couldn’t believe how fast time had flown. I only had three months of football season to have any shot at dressing, and as we got into October, it wasn’t looking good.
The first two home games were against Northwestern and Michigan State, back-to-back Saturdays at the end of September and the first week of October. The dress lists post on Thursdays before each game. I walked down to the bulletin board outside of the locker room on both of those Thursdays, scanned the list, saw my name wasn’t on it, and walked away. I didn’t say anything about it. I didn’t make a fuss about it. After all, other than Coach Parseghian, my family, D-Bob, and Freddy, no one had known I had this crazy dream of dressing for a game and actually playing until that newspaper article came out. Now everyone knew! Still, I didn’t want to appear to be making a big deal of it. There were plenty of other guys on that team who would never get a chance to suit up. I’d kick myself sometimes for even dreaming about it. What makes me so special? I’d think. Get over it.
It’s tough, though, when you a have a big dream like that and someone in a position of power, like Parseghian, tells you that it’s possible, and then you go and tell other people who mean so much to you; it’s tough to think it’s not going to come true.
The best way to deal with that frustration was out on the field. I played harder than I ever had in my life that fall season. I went at every play like it was my last, like I was knee deep in the biggest, most important game of my life. In a way, that wasn’t inaccurate. This was, once and for all, the last season of football I would ever play.
Coach Devine noticed. There were a couple of times during practice when he gathered everyone around for a pep talk and brought up my name. “I wish you guys had more heart, like Rudy. I wish you’d throw yourselves into these practices 100 percent. Then maybe you’d see the results we all want to see on game day!”
That embarrassed me. I was just doing my job. Why would anyone want to play for Notre Dame and not work as hard as they could to be the best they could? The whole thing didn’t make sense to me. I was part of the team; I wanted the team to be great. Therefore, I had to be great! I had to play my hardest. What else was there to do?
I remember listening to the next couple of away games on the radio— games that would go down in Notre Dame history. The first was against North Carolina on October 11. We were losing 14–0 at the end of the third quarter. My guys just hadn’t been able to move the ball. Our quarterback was struggling, plain and simple. It was painful to listen to it! He finally found his footing and caught a break, which brought us to 14–6 with about six minutes to go. That’s when Coach Devine replaced him with a freshman hot-shot who no one in the football world had heard of at that point: a guy named Joe Montana. Over the course of the next five minutes, the team came to life. Montana nailed a couple of good passes, scored a touchdown, and made a two-point conversion to tie it up; and then Ted Burgmeier snagged what should have been a simple short pass and turned it into an eighty-yard touchdown to win the game 14–21. The whole campus erupted! You could hear cheers from every window, echoing across the chilly lawns under that October sky. It was awesome. A week later, Joe Montana led the team to another legendary fourth-quarter comeback against Air Force, only this time Notre Dame was down twenty-one points at the end of the third quarter. We managed to rally back to a 30–31 win.
While the fans erupted and the student body erupted and everyone was patting Joe Montana on the back, I knew better than to think that Dan Devine or Joe Yonto or Merv Johnson would consider that kind of a last-minute comeback any sort of a cheer-worthy victory for our team. If we were playing right, if we were playing as a unit, we never would have fallen that far behind.
When the team got back from that Air Force game, I was waiting for them. I knew when they were scheduled to arrive, and I was always there to greet them. But the first thing Coach Devine and Coach Johnson did that day was take the whole traveling team over to the big stadium to run sprints, a punishing workout in return for their near defeat. I could have just gone back to my room at that point, but something in my gut told me I needed to go run with them. We were all in this together. So I grabbed my uniform and suited up.
“Where you going?” Coach Johnson said. “You’re not part of the traveling team.”
I remember saying something about feeling responsible. The fact that the offensive line wasn’t doing its job the way it should was, in some way, my fault. I was their human tackle dummy. I was the guy tasked with working them harder than anyone else so they could prep for those big games! So I went and ran those sprints right along with them.
Even in that chilly October air, the sweat poured off me. I was exhausted. Heck, my legs are half the length of some of those guys’, which means I run two strides for their every one! It hurt!
When Coach Johnson blew his whistle and finally called it a day, he came up to me, all pumped up, and yelled loud enough for every other guy to hear: “You’re a real man, Rudy. Takes a real man to do what you just did.”
I didn’t know how to react to that. I knew he meant it as a compliment, but something felt a little off. I wished he had told the rest of the guys who had gone back to the locker room that we all had to run sprints. We’re all in it together. We’re all one team. To me, that compliment solidified that feeling of division that permeated the team at that point—one that permeates a lot of great teams. What I did shouldn’t have been considered anything special. It should have been what every member of that team wanted to do!
Unfortunately, I think those words from Coach Johnson ticked off a few of the first-team players. They had already heard Dan Devine use me in his “heart” example a couple of times that season, and the whole thing didn’t go over so well with some of the full-scholarship players and All-American types who were far more talented and athletically gifted than I was.
That sense of division really came to a head one practice in late October, between the Southern California and Navy games—two of the final three home games of the season. USC kicked our butts, right there on our home field. The final score was 17–24. Morale was low. Tensions were running high. Practices were running long. It was the end of a particularly brutal day, probably the last play or two of the entire practice, and when the whistle blew I shot right through the tired and worn-out offensive line with everything I had and tackled one of our top players. He popped up madder than a hornet, and for days and days he wouldn’t let it go. He kept complaining that I was pushing too hard, kept complaining that the practices were too long, kept complaining about everything.
We played Navy that Saturday, and won, which boosted morale as we headed into a week full of practices before our final home game of the season. Yet still, even on that Monday, that one particular player kept complaining about everything. The guy was a fifth-year senior. He was supposed to be a starter but wasn’t, so he had a big chip on his shoulder.
Back in the locker room that afternoon, I had heard just about enough. “Quit complaining!” I yelled.
“Aw, you’re nothin’ but a suck-up, Rudy,” he said to me, and he pushed me!
I wasn’t about to take that, so I pushed him back, and another player stepped in and stopped us from going any further. Good thing too. With all my Bengal Bouts training I might have knocked his head off! “Knock it off,” the other player said, not directed at me, but right at that senior. The message he sent, loud and clear, was, “Why don’t you try putting as much energy on the field as you’re putting into all your complaining?”
The whole thing was ridiculous. I wasn’t looking for a confrontation. All I ever did was work to make the team better and to make those players the best they could be. That was my role. Even though someone else came to my defense, I felt like I was
being punished for doing my job to the best of my ability. The whole incident set me over the edge. That us-versus-them mentality was eating me up inside. I was never going to move up the depth chart. I was never gonna get a chance to run onto that field. What the heck was I doing? Why was I working so hard if all it was causing was anguish and agony?
I kept asking myself those questions all week. And when Thursday came around, and my name wasn’t on the dress list, I walked out of the locker room thinking I’d never be back. Why bother? A couple of players saw how angry I was as I stormed out and asked what was up. “I quit!” I yelled as I kept on walking. They knew why I was upset. They knew I felt like it just wasn’t worth it. Like I’d been wasting my time.
There were tears in my eyes when I walked back into my room. I slammed the door and dropped down on my bed—exhausted, spent, and over it.
Couldn’t have been thirty seconds later when I heard a knock.
“Come in,” I said, wiping my eyes and sitting up.
It was Rudy, the old janitor who lent me the cot in his closet the previous summer. Apparently I walked right past him on my way in. I didn’t even notice, but he noticed. He saw my face. He saw my pain. He asked if he could sit. I said, “Sure.”
He asked me what was up, and I told him the whole sorry tale. I opened up about the incident with the senior that Monday and the bigger picture of feeling unwanted, unappreciated by the very guys I was working so hard for, and how disappointed I was that I wouldn’t get to dress for a game—that no one would even know I had ever played for Notre Dame.
He listened. Really listened. Rudy was one of those guys who always seemed to be smiling. Always content. So I was surprised when he opened up to me about knowing exactly how I felt.
“When I lost my leg, I thought my whole world was over,” he said.
“When you what?” I asked. I had no idea he was missing a leg. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Was I the most unobservant guy in the world? It was a strange, strange feeling. He lifted up his pant leg a bit and showed me the prosthetic, extending down into his scuffed-up brown leather shoe. I had noticed he had a limp. I never thought anything about it. It never occurred to me that his leg was gone.
“I lost it to diabetes,” he said.
I apologized for not noticing.
“Don’t apologize, Rudy. You see the good in people. You do. You don’t see what’s wrong with them first. You don’t look for flaws. That’s a gift.”
He talked to me about landing the job at Notre Dame and how thrilled he was, not only to find work in his condition, but also to land a job at a place he so admired. He was a lifelong Notre Dame fan. He described to me how much he loved the campus, how it felt like a church or a temple to him, how at peace he felt just walking between these beautiful buildings every morning, and how rich he felt to be able to contribute to Notre Dame athletics in his own way.
His name would never be up on a wall. His name wouldn’t appear in any history books or yearbooks. Didn’t matter. “I’m a part of something great,” he said. “And I know it. And that’s all that matters.”
That started me crying again.
“Don’t quit, Rudy,” he said. “Don’t quit the team. Not now. Not after coming this far. Not after all the hard work you put in. You quit, and I promise you—you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”
I let out a bit of a moan. “Sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I don’t mean to cry.”
“It’s okay to cry. You just think about what I said.”
“I will. Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said, standing up strong and laying his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll see you around.”
I called home that night. My brother Francis picked up the phone, and I told him what had happened. I told him there was only one home game left, and that it didn’t look like I was going to dress for a game after all. I told him I wasn’t going to bother going to practice anymore.
“Are you nuts?” he said. “You can’t quit the team. It’s Notre Dame!
What the heck are you thinking?”
Of my six brothers, Frank’s the one most like me. The one who got into trouble. The one who finished second or third in his class—from the bottom. The one who suffered from similar undiagnosed learning disorders. He confided with me on the phone that night just how much he’d been influenced by my whole course of action. The fact that I said I was going to get into Notre Dame, and then did it. The fact that I said I was going to play football for Notre Dame, and I did it. It didn’t matter if I dressed for a game or not. I accomplished what I set out to do, and that something was much bigger than any of us had ever dreamed possible. He talked to me about his own dreams of becoming a police officer one day, and how he was turning that weight room he’d set up in my parents’ garage into a business: Rudy’s Gym. It was awesome. He was already starting a business just coming out of high school, and he said I was the one who helped inspire him to do it.
It’s humbling to hear something like that from your little brother.
“Don’t quit the team, Rudy. Don’t let yourself down like that. We all know what you’ve done. You know what you’ve done. That’s what matters.”
I know I’m a little hardheaded, but I went to bed still thinking I was done with the team. I was confused, of course, and my mind kept spinning, but the anger and frustration seemed to overwhelm the very reasonable arguments for going back.
The next morning, I woke up a little less stressed. There’s nothing like sleep to help give you some perspective. Still, it hurt to think that I wasn’t appreciated by all of the other players. I had given everything to that team.
That’s when a third set of lessons came knocking on my door. First Rudy. Then Frank. Now? Four team members came by to give me a little pep talk before practice. Some of the strongest, most well-respected members of the team: Pat Sarb, Dan Knott, Ivan Brown, and Bobby Zanot. They were all real serious. They just wanted me to know they didn’t want me to quit. They all had struggles. They all got frustrated, they said. They were all bummed out about the way the team was playing and disappointed by the big attitudes of some of the star players, and they said it was unforgivable the way I’d been treated by that fifth-year senior. They were also upset about that new NCAA rule that was keeping so many of us seniors from suiting up for our last home game. After all, it was a Notre Dame tradition! But they wanted me to know how much they all appreciated me. They wanted me to know how much they admired me and were blown away by how hard I worked.
“Be sure to come to practice today,” they said. “You won’t regret it.”
It was exactly what I needed to hear, from exactly the people I needed to hear it from. It wouldn’t have meant any more to me if Ara Parseghian himself had come along and told me to get off my behind and get back on the field.
By the time practice came around that day, I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to dress in the locker room with everyone else. I held off and showed up late. It was the day before the final home game, against Georgia Tech, and I glanced at the dress list outside the locker room on the way to the field, just in case.
My name wasn’t on it.
I dressed in the empty locker room. I walked out toward the practice field with my helmet under my arm, listening to the sound of those explosive hits, the crunch of that herd of cattle exploding into each other, the yells and whistles of the game I loved, the team I loved, echoing off the beige-brick walls of the distant campus buildings.
I stepped through the gate, to the field behind the blocked-out fence, reminded of just how privileged I was to be able to pass that barrier, to be on the inside—a part of the team.
“Sorry I’m late, Coach,” I said to Coach Devine.
“Glad you’re here, Rudy,” he said, turning and yelling. “Now let’s get back to work!”
I pulled my helmet on and took my position, fist in the grass, determined to give it my all. I could hear my own breath in the helmet—the muffled sound of the quart
erback’s call. I focused in. Everything on the line. Time to play. Instincts fired up. The snap! Stop him. Smash!
At the end of the day, Coach Devine told everyone to take a knee and we gathered around him for a pep talk and a rundown of what to expect on Saturday. He talked about how practice had been going well, but it was no time to rest. He talked about Georgia Tech and what we needed to do to win. How we weren’t going to let another team come in here and push us around. And he talked about the fact that it would be the last home game in that stadium for all of us seniors. He said he knew what it meant to us all, and that for those players who dressed for the game, he would do everything he could to get them in for at least one play—as long as we were winning.
Everyone cheered.
“And one last thing,” he said. “We’re going to make one change to the dress list for Saturday. One player is going to give up his uniform . . . and Rudy Ruettiger’s gonna dress.”
I was floored. Speechless. As the players around me started applauding and hooting and hollering for me, patting me on the back, I just closed my eyes and smiled. I thanked God for giving me that blessing.
Then I opened my eyes, looked at Coach Devine, and said, “Thank you, Coach!”
“Good practice, everyone. See you tomorrow,” he said.
As we got up and headed back to the locker room, more and more players came and slapped me on the back. “Alright, Rudy . . . Way to go, Rudy!” Some of them got real emotional about it. I still couldn’t believe it. It was almost as if it wasn’t happening. Once again, as if it were a dream. It was a dream. A dream come true.
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