As we reached the end zone by the tunnel, the guys set me down and an AP reporter came running up to me. “I’ve never seen anything like that. All the years I’ve been covering Notre Dame, and I’ve never seen that kind of excitement. You’re the first Notre Dame player ever to be carried off the field. It’s the kind of thing that only happens in Hollywood!”
I just shook my head and smiled. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do! The adrenaline was still pumping so hard I couldn’t think straight.
The kind of thing that only happens in Hollywood. What a thing to say! What a thing for someone to say about something that happened—to me!
I still felt like I was floating when I walked out of that locker room. Crowds of friends and parents and fans gathered all around the door right next to the tunnel. In a way, it was like coming out of the Bengal Bouts. People slapping me on the back, congratulating me. I just kept saying thanks over and over. I was so thankful! I could hardly believe it was real.
Then I spotted my parents.
They both had that look in their eye. That look I saw at boot camp graduation. That look they had when I handed them the acceptance letter from Notre Dame.
My dad, though, had something extra written all over his face. Notre Dame football meant so much to him. It was difficult for me to imagine how awesome it must have been for him to watch his son out there on that field, sacking the quarterback no less. He put his hand out to shake my hand, and when I grabbed it, he hugged me. For the first time I can remember. A big, proud squeeze.
We held that hug in slow motion as a bunch of the other players filtered out and that excited crowd milled around us. When we finally let go, I swear I saw a tear in his eye.
To bring that sort of emotion out of him was something. Really something. It felt big, as if our lives had turned a corner. As if everything would be a little different from that day forward. As if what he saw in me had changed something in him. Once again, it just seemed proof positive that the act of pursuing my dreams, of never giving up, had opened more doors and produced more results than I ever could have imagined coming true. Not just for me, but for people all around me.
Across town, D-Bob was sitting in his sporting goods store watching the Notre Dame game on TV, and he told me later how he just about fell off his chair when he saw my number 45 run onto the field. He stood up and yelled at the TV screen: “Go Rudy!!!” When I sacked the quarterback, he said, he threw his beer can against the wall. He stuck his hands into his hair in disbelief, then spun around and grabbed the rest of a six-pack, throwing all of ’em against the wall. That was it. He was quitting drinking. Right then and there.
Thirty-five years later, he’s still sober.
My friends. My family. The people I loved. The people who loved me. All of them had been affected by the fact that I followed through and achieved and exceeded this wild dream of mine.
Over time, I’d come to learn that those people I knew were only the tip of the iceberg. The inspiring effects of dreams fulfilled had run deeper than I ever imagined.
The semester ended. I went home to Joliet for the break. The holidays came and went, and the glow of the final twenty-seven seconds of that game never faded. Saying good-bye to teammates at the end of the season had been hard, but in a way, I didn’t even have time to miss football once I got back to school. I had a whole new challenge in front of me: my final shot at the Bengal Bouts.
This time, riding high from the feeling of topping my wildest dreams on that football team, I decided I wanted the title. Not just a jacket. The title of Bengal Bouts champion.
I hit the gym harder than ever before. Hour upon hour. Six weeks straight. Working the bag, push-ups, sit-ups, weights, and medicine ball twice as hard as I’d ever pushed myself before. I ran every morning, all over campus, no matter what the weather. Everywhere I went I’d get cheers of, “Hey, Rudy! . . . Go get ’em, Rudy!” The whole student body was charging up for the big three-day battle, and with my underdog status solidified with that second-place finish the year before, there was absolutely no question in my mind that I’d have plenty of support in the stands.
My parents and a bunch of my brothers and sisters would be there too. They insisted they wouldn’t miss it for the world.
It was difficult for me at times to come to grips with having so much support. I had faced so many obstacles and so many naysayers throughout my life that the idea of my friends, my family, and even perfect strangers lining up behind me now was an unusual feeling. I often asked myself, How did that happen? I’d look back at the path I took to reach that point and think, How did I manage to do that?
The magic of the entire climb up that hill had been taking it one step at a time. Never giving up. Never losing my faith. Never taking no for an answer, no matter how many doubts and fears I had or how many times I came close to quitting. I thanked God every day for the lessons. I thanked God every day for the gift of laying that path out in front of me every time I took a step. And even in the dead of winter, I stopped by the Grotto to pray for continued guidance and understanding as I made my stride toward yet another ambitious goal.
Six weeks of training. Three days of fights. The routine was exactly the same. The noise in that basketball arena was exactly the same. The matches progressed in almost exactly the same way they did when I climbed into that ring the previous year. First match: landed more punches. Won the match. Second match: against a guy who was bigger than me, got underneath his arms, landed lots of hits to the body. Won the match.
Now it was championship time. I kept my eyes on the prize. Focus. There was no stopping me. I knew I could do this, no matter whom I faced. Of course, I had no idea that the whole David-and-Goliath factor was about to take on an epic new proportion: In the final match, I wound up facing another football player. A giant. It was amazing to me how different two bodies could shape up in the same weight class. The fans went nuts! The entire student body sat on the edge of their seats, and as soon as that first bell rang they were up on their feet. The place was rocking! Yet all of that noise fell off into the background. The power of focus is incredible, especially when a much bigger guy is throwing fists at your face. One slip, one break in concentration, and I could’ve gotten my head knocked off.
That wasn’t gonna happen.
Round One: I was sizing him up. He was sizing me up. He knew the kind of tenacity he faced. He saw it at practice every day. He just had no idea what kind of punches I could throw. I found myself holding back a little. I didn’t want him to know what he had in store. The psychology of the sport is half the fun.
Round Two: He popped me a couple of times, pretty good. I popped him right back. But I was still holding back. Still holding out. Was he? We seemed pretty evenly matched so far. I wanted to finish this thing right. That’s when the crowd really started to get into it.
Just before the third bell, the start of the third and final round, I heard the sound of a few scattered voices chanting, “Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!” More joined in on the other side of the arena. “Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!”
I had to be careful not to get swept up in it. I had to be careful not to get overconfident. I tried to tune it out. I tried to focus on why I was in that ring. I tried to focus on all of the things in my life that I wanted to punch right out of existence. I thought back to fifth grade and the humiliation in front of my class; to high school and the constant feeling of inadequacy and hurt; to those fights we had down by the river; to the untimely deaths of Big Nick, Ralph, and Siskel; to the surprisingly lonely feeling of never being hugged by my father for all those years; to the jerks at the power plant and the naysayers of Joliet; to my dyslexia; to the elitists who didn’t want guys like me to get into Notre Dame, who didn’t want me on that football team, who didn’t want me to work hard, to be the best, to help push them to victory while reaching my own goals.
Ding!
When that bell went off, I was raging. I put everything on the line. That guy didn’t know what hit him! Right,
right, right. Left! Boom, boom, boom. I never let up. He was tired. It showed. I felt more energized than I did in round one!
When the final bell came down, the sound of that crowd nearly knocked me over. There was no question in anyone’s mind that I’d won the fight. They were screaming in victory and cheering me on long before the judge’s decision was announced. And when that long, drawn-out, magnificent announcer’s voice said “Ruuuuu-dyyy Ruuue-ttiger!” I jumped off the canvas and up in the air, and the crowd went nuts all over again.
This time, when I saw my dad ringside, he didn’t hesitate to come straight in for a hug. Things were different between us now. He was different now.
That Bengal Bouts win was everything the sheer glory of victory should be. It was the embodiment of a dream come true. A beginning, middle, and end. An individual dream set into motion, worked at, fought for with nothing left to chance or the decisions of others, everything riding on my own two shoulders and the power of my conviction to win.
The Notre Dame football victory, the sacking of that quarterback, both in my mind and in my heart, were shared with every one of my teammates. This? This victory was mine and mine alone.
It was astounding to me that such big dreams could come to fruition back-to-back. I felt as if I was on a fast-moving train on a track aimed at the fulfillment of every dream I’d ever had—not to mention a few dreams I had never even imagined—since I first allowed myself to envision going to Notre Dame way back on the bridge of that ship, rolling toward Europe in heavy seas in the dark of night.
First came the gift of playing in that Notre Dame game. Second, this pure, individual victory at the Bengal Bouts. Next up? The fulfillment of a third and final dream, the ultimate goal at the end of the path: graduation.
There was only one thing that could derail me, and that was statistics. I thought I was done with math, but a course in statistics was a requirement of the sociology major, and I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. There was nothing about that class that made sense. I worked hard. I asked for help. I used all of Freddy’s techniques in my studying. Didn’t help. I was failing. With my heart so into the Bengal Bouts, I didn’t put in the sort of after-class time that stats class required of me. But I should have.
I mistakenly had reached a point where I didn’t care very much about my grades. I figured all that mattered was that I passed, so I could earn my degree. No one in the real world would go back and look at my grades. Once anyone saw that I graduated from the University of Notre Dame, it would be an automatic thumbs-up on my academic abilities!
Unfortunately that attitude, combined with my brain’s inability to grasp the intricacies of statistics, added up to trouble. The only way I knew how to counter that trouble was to put in the sort of hard work and dedication that had worked for me elsewhere. To show up to every class. To let that professor know how hard I was struggling. To show him that I wanted to pass. On any given day, only about half of the students showed up in that professor’s classroom, so I hoped my constant presence would pay off when he sat down to give out grades. I prayed! Especially as May approached.
They documented my tackle in the Notre Dame yearbook. That 1976 edition of The Dome features a photo of me sacking that Georgia Tech quarterback. Seeing a photo of myself in that book, surrounded by photos of all of the great players on that team, was something. There I was, right there with them. A part of the team. A part of that history forever. Just as I had dreamed. Even better than I had envisioned.
Around the same time the yearbooks came in, our class rings came in too. I had my Notre Dame graduation ring, with that ND on the side, just like the one that officer wore in the navy. Slipping that heavy golden ring onto my own finger felt like coming full circle. A journey, almost complete.
The journey, of course, had been better than I envisioned. Bigger. More fulfilling. But I still felt remarkably unsettled. Unsure about something. One part of it still felt like a dream.
The graduation ceremony was set to be held in the ACC, the very building where I worked, slept, and lived for the past two years. I helped set up the chairs. I sat in my room as they put together all of the final touches. And when they laid out all of our signed degrees on a great big set of tables, I snuck in to take a peek. Quite honestly, I wasn’t 100 percent positive I was going to graduate. It just didn’t seem possible! I was sure I had missed something. Some credit. Some class. I was told they would send you a letter if you weren’t going to graduate. I hadn’t received that letter. Still, I was worried. What if that stats professor flunked me and never let me know?
I scanned through the degrees, alphabetically, one after another, skipping quickly through them and over them until finally I found it: Daniel E. Ruettiger. There it was. My degree. My University of Notre Dame degree. I checked to make sure the signature at the bottom was there, just to make sure it was official.
It was. I had proof!
I got butterflies in my stomach as I walked back to my room. When my parents showed up, they were dressed to the nines and their faces were flashier than anything they wore. They were beaming. They melded right into that crowd of proud parents—the rich, the elite, the exclusive club that is Notre Dame. They were one of them now. They wore that look of pride that says “My son graduated from Notre Dame.” They could wear that look wherever they went now, for the rest of their lives. That was powerful.
We posed for snapshots in my cap and gown, and they went in to take their seats. I joined my classmates in line, and before we knew it we were all filtering into the arena. It was awesome. Such a spectacle. All of those students, some fifteen hundred graduates, and all of those proud parents packing the stands right up to the rafters.
Vernon E. Jordan Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, was our graduation speaker. He was a pretty eloquent guy, from what I remember, and had a few laughs in his speech as well. But all any of us really cared about was getting to the big moment.
With that many students, it would take hours and hours to have everyone come up to get their degree one at a time. So instead, they just had all the MBA students stand up together to acknowledge their commencement, then all the law students, and so forth. And then finally, at the end, came the big group: the undergraduates.
To stand up and cheer with the rest of my graduating class made me feel more a part of Notre Dame than any other moment. I had come to the school through a side door, struggled to find my place before I was ever a student, worked my way through school, lived in a tiny room just outside of this arena, and never quite felt like I was fully a part of it . . . until that moment. That moment when I suddenly felt like no one could deny it. Nobody could take away the fact that I was a Notre Dame graduate. I was a part of the tradition. This is real, I thought. This is great!
I threw my hat in the air along with everyone else and then rushed right over to pick it up off the floor. I wanted the keepsake! I wanted to keep everything. I wanted to hold on to that proof that I was there, that I did it, that I accomplished what everyone said I couldn’t. Every tangible piece I could hold was important to me, and I knew I would hold those items for as long as I lived.
When I met up with my parents after the ceremony, I gave them both a great big hug. And when I looked in their eyes, I decided to let go of one of those tangible bits of my personal Notre Dame history: I gave my Notre Dame ring to my dad. I just felt like he should have it. I knew he would cherish it. He tried to refuse. He said I should keep it. “Dad, I’ll buy a replacement, and then we’ll both wear one!” He liked that idea. He put it on his finger and looked at it. A Notre Dame ring. On Dan Ruettiger’s hand. Just a few years earlier, that would’ve seemed like the most far-fetched thing in the universe. Yet there it was. He smiled at that. And I smiled right at him.
After all of that glory, all of that triumph, it was a short walk back to my room. Hundreds of parents and professors and coaches and students were still milling about as I stepped in and closed the door. I had already packed up
most of my things. The walls were bare concrete blocks again. My bed was stripped. My desk was cleaned off and my duffel was full. I suddenly felt incredibly sad.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and took a big deep breath. I didn’t want to leave. What the heck am I going to do now? I thought.
For all of my big dreams, big goals, big hopes, I hadn’t spent any time thinking about what I was going to do once I graduated. I guess some part of me, right up until that moment when I stood up and cheered and threw my hat in the air, maybe some part of me didn’t really fully believe that it was ever going to happen. I prayed for it to happen. I convinced myself that I knew it would happen. I willed it to happen. But now that it had, I sat there dumbstruck.
I felt so happy, so fulfilled, so overwhelmed, so proud—and so lost.
What am I gonna do now?
Part III
Up Against the Red Velvet Ropes
13
Rocky Too
Graduating from Notre Dame set me on a course not unlike the one I set after high school. For a while, I wound up drifting. Dreamless. Unsure what I really wanted to do with my life. Void of any real goals. I hadn’t thought ahead. Maybe I hadn’t believed in myself quite enough to make plans for a time after my Notre Dame dream had been achieved. In some ways, all that lack of planning does is leave you vulnerable to saying yes to whatever offer might come along. You’d better hope and pray that the offers you take are good ones, and if they’re not, that you at least have the vision to learn something from the experiences that unfold in your directionless state.
That directionless state isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not at all. Sometimes we need that rest in life. A breather. A time to just let loose and see what happens. Those times offer up a great sense of discovery. Outside forces can wind up taking you to places you might not ever have imagined for yourself—the way the Vietnam War era took me into the navy. Without the navy, I wouldn’t have gotten to Notre Dame!
Rudy Page 18