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!
Once again, that’s easy to see in retrospect. In the middle of it, I wasn’t so sure. It’s scary to live life feeling trapped or confused or unhappy with your job. It’s hard to trust that anything will ever change. But that trust is what you need the most. That faith that you’re on the right path, even if it doesn’t feel quite right at the moment, is important. The truth in life comes from following your intuition and the gut feelings that God gives you, and then making the right choices when opportunities present themselves. And heck, if opportunities aren’t presenting themselves, then it’s all about having the guts to make the kinds of choices that give you those opportunities.
At the very least, every experience you have, every job you take, and every path you walk will teach you something. Pay attention to the signs along the way, and you never know what new dreams and ambitions will develop.
As I was on my way out of the ACC after the graduation ceremony, I ran into Coach Devine.
“What are you gonna do next year, Rudy?”
I told him I had no idea. I hadn’t really thought about it. And right then and there, he told me he really liked the way the younger kids on the team connected with me, and he wondered if I’d be interested in taking a job as his graduate assistant.
“Heck ya!” I said.
I had no idea what that job would entail. I had no idea what would be required of me. All I knew is that an opportunity to stay tied into Notre Dame football just dropped in my lap, so I went for it. After all, what was a football player to do after his football career ended? Coach. Working as a GA would put me on a path toward coaching. It made sense. It’s what people expected. It was a normal path for someone like me.
But was it the path I wanted?
I found the answer pretty quickly. Being a GA meant I had to enroll in a couple of graduate level courses at Notre Dame. Sitting in those chairs, listening to lectures, taking notes—man, I was done with school. I didn’t want any part of it. I was burned out. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And what’s the point of taking classes if they’re just making you miserable or you wind up skipping all the time?
I remembered back to seeing Parseghian in his office at 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. at the ACC, and I started watching the routines of Devine and all of the assistant coaches. I realized that coaching for Notre Dame was a 24/7 job, filled with paperwork and politics, pressures from parents, school officials, and the NCAA. It never stopped! I saw coaches playing inferior players over talented players because of political pressures from outside the game. I never realized why they did that stuff until I was on the inside, and now that I was there, I didn’t want to be a part of it.
I enjoyed the coaching part of it. They wound up placing me on the junior varsity team, coaching freshmen. Special teams was my assignment, and I loved pushing those guys to be great. I had long ago let go of all those goofy notions that so many coaches hold on to—the stuff about yelling and screaming and putting kids down. I got out there and worked them hard, praised them for their work, made sure they stayed focused, jumped in and showed ’em how it should be done by example rather than words, and did everything I could to encourage their camaraderie while inspiring them to be the best. During regular practice, Devine put me in charge of the scout team, so I was coaching kids who were just like me— the outsiders, the human tackle dummies, the walk-ons. It was awesome. They all knew my story. They all knew about Rudy. They wanted to be like Rudy! That was a strange feeling. They all wanted a shot at running out of that tunnel and seemed to understand the hard work and sacrifice it would take to get there. So they listened to me, and I helped make sure they all felt like they were part of the team, valued resources on the gridiron. I loved that.
Still, the coaching aspect seemed to be the thing that consumed the smallest amount of my time each week. Instead, it came down to the assistant work. Grunt stuff. I had done a lot of that sort of work in life already, and my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Then there was the paperwork. The organizational tasks. Sitting for what seemed like endless hours in meetings in which no decisions were ever really made, and the only thing anyone agreed upon was the date and time of the next meeting. Not exactly the kind of stuff that makes you jump out of bed in the morning.
Another graduate assistant and I were tasked with splicing game film together for the coaches; it was a tedious task and not an easy thing to do when you’ve got dyslexia. I kind of liked working with the film. I liked the idea of editing things together to make everything make sense so the coaches could use that raw film in teaching. Of course, when I was distracted (as I was pretty easily, and often) a couple of times I would grab the wrong bits of film and splice ’em backward. I’d wind up putting the offense with the defense so the sequence made no sense at all. That wasn’t a help to anyone.
As the end of that first semester as a post-grad approached, I realized the whole thing made no sense. It just wasn’t me. It wasn’t the way I wanted to be spending my time. It’s funny, but unless you have a real direction in college—unless you know that you’re inspired to be a doctor, for instance—you’re left at the end of those four years with a tremendous feeling of uncertainty. Everyone thinks college should be all about education, but if you don’t have dreams that you’re applying those lessons to, what good is all that education? If you don’t know where or how you’re going to apply that education, is it really going to stick in your brain?
By December 1976, I was desperately in need of some inspiration. I didn’t realize it at the time. I wasn’t consciously seeking it out. I didn’t prepare for it. I wasn’t looking for it when it came. It was a typical Saturday night, and all I was doing was going to the movies. But as I sat down in that South Bend theater and the lights dimmed, a whole new path was set in motion right in front of me. A whole new path that God laid down, that would take me places I had never even dreamed.
The film I was there to see was Rocky, and it was unlike any other movie I had ever seen. I always enjoyed going to the movies. I often thought fondly of my teenage days at the old Rialto Theater in downtown Joliet. I loved the escape of disappearing into another world for a couple of hours at a time. But this? This movie was about people who seemed to come from my world. As if the cameras knew who I was. The setting in the grittier, downtrodden, working-class neighborhoods of Philadelphia reminded me of the power plant and the bars and the criss-crossing train tracks of Joliet. And this character, this “Rocky Balboa,” reminded me, just a little bit, of me! He wasn’t the best-looking guy. He certainly wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He talked a little funny. He was stocky. Gruff. In a lot of ways, people would look at him like any other working-class bum. But there was something about him. A little fire in his belly. A passion. A dream. And when he saw a shot to go after that dream, he set his sights on the goal and just went for it. The harder he dreamed, the better things got. People came into his life who would help him. His coach, Mickey, was a gift—almost the way Freddy was a gift to me at Notre Dame. He found love and support from a new girlfriend, Adrian, and his buddy named Paulie, who reminded me a little bit of D-Bob when it came to his sense of humor. He wasn’t a naturally talented boxer. He wasn’t a naturally talented athlete. But he had heart. He had passion. And his dream wasn’t to be the world champion. His dream was just to get into that ring and go toe-to-toe with the best. To last all fifteen rounds— something no one else had done against the mighty champ named Apollo Creed. I could relate to that dream! It was awesome!
Having been in the boxing ring myself, I swear that I could feel every punch, every swing, every broken nose and bruised
rib those guys took during the fight at the end of that movie. The music had me up on the edge of my seat. The power of that whole story grabbed me and set my heart racing like I was right in that ring myself. And when Rocky did it, when he made it, when that final bell rang and he knew he had made it through all fifteen rounds—that he had accomplished the impossible, the thing no one said could be done—I cheered out loud! I had never done that in a movie theater. I had tears in my eyes. I could hardly believe the way my emotions poured out of me. Over a movie!
I walked out into the frigid air of a wintery South Bend night, my breath gathering in clouds all around my face as I strolled back to my little off-campus apartment, thinking, Man, I want to make a movie like that! I want to make a movie like that about my story! How cool would that be?
It wasn’t much more than a thought at that moment. A ridiculous fantasy. I knew nothing about Hollywood or movie-making whatsoever. All I knew was that film had created a feeling in me like something I had never felt before. All I knew was that whenever I told my story of my twenty-seven seconds of glory on that Notre Dame football field, people reacted. They were blown away. All I knew, way deep down inside, is that seeing Rocky had somehow changed my life. Maybe I wouldn’t make a movie. I wasn’t delusional. But there was something about the message of that movie, the inspiration it planted in my heart that would serve me going forward. I knew it. I just knew it.
The spring semester began and I sat in the stands watching other people, younger people, take to the ring at the Bengal Bouts; spring football got underway, and I found myself out on those same fields, coaching a bunch of kids and participating in the recruiting process as it went into full swing for the following year. But I simply felt lost. I felt like I was sitting in the stands at high school football games, reliving old glories, Friday nights under the lights. It felt exactly the same as it did back in those post–high school years. I didn’t want to be there anymore, but I also had no idea what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, or how the heck I was going to get there.
With all of that confusion, I felt like I needed a coach for my life that was as good as the coaches I’d had in football. I need my very own Mickey! Like Rocky! I thought.
Well, guess what? My wish was about to come true. And the Mickey would be someone I had known and admired for years.
Ara Parseghian had stayed right there in South Bend after he left the job as head coach, and he always seemed to be around campus. He was moving on with his life in many ways, transitioning from coaching to becoming a commentator for ABC Sports. He’d always say “hi” when he saw me, and we’d wind up talking about whatever was going on with the team. He seemed interested in what I was up to, and I was very interested to hear what he was up to. I was fascinated that a guy could move from one unbelievably successful career into another the way he was later in life. It developed into a friendship of sorts, which my old self couldn’t really have imagined. He seemed like such a god from afar. Then almost like a father-figure type once he was my coach. Now? He was just a good guy who I was always happy to run into. I guess people are people, no matter how great or talented they are. The fact that I find myself talking to everyone, no matter what their position is in life, has proven that to me over and over again. There’s no reason to hesitate to talk to anyone in life. At heart, we’re all just people. You know?
Toward the end of that post-graduate year, I got into a real serious talk with Parseghian about my future. “I don’t want to coach,” I told him. “I don’t know what I want to do.”
“You should go sell insurance,” he said to me. “You’d be great at it.”
“I don’t know anything about insurance. Where would I go sell insurance?” I asked.
“Go see Pat Ryan. Pat Ryan & Associates up in Chicago. I coached him at Northwestern.”
Given my lack of direction, I figured the best thing I could possibly do with my life at that moment was to follow Coach’s advice. So I did. Turns out Pat Ryan was one of the richest guys in the world, and his insurance agency was a huge, successful organization. One call from Parseghian got me in the door, and I wound up getting interviewed at 9:00 a.m. a few days later.
The long and short of that meeting was pretty simple: “You’re not qualified,” the interviewer told me.
“Well, what do I need to do to get qualified?” I asked.
“You need to be around the business more.”
“Is that all? Okay, then. I got it,” I said. If he wanted me to be around the business, I figured I’d stay right there and be around the business as much as I could. Starting that very moment.
I left his office and took a seat in the lounge. Stayed right there. All day. Never moved.
Around six o’clock, that interviewer came out of his office headed for home. He spotted me sitting there. “Hey,” he said, “didn’t I interview you this morning?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied.
“Ruettiger, right? What are you still doing here?”
“You said stick around until you get the experience, so that’s what I’m doing.”
He kind of chuckled to himself. “Alright, Mr. Ruettiger. You come and see me tomorrow. You’re hired.”
Hey, the way I saw it, when Ara Parseghian tells you to go get a job, you go do it! I wasn’t about to fail. If he didn’t hire me that day, I would have kept coming back until he did. Call that hardheaded, but it’s basically the same way I’ve accomplished all of my big accomplishments. Why change what’s working, right? Perseverance is everything.
The insurance business wasn’t easy. It required a lot of math and a pretty decent understanding of statistics, which of course I was no good at. It took me three or four tries to pass the test just to get my license. But I was great at sales meetings. The primary thing we were doing was selling insurance add-ons to car dealerships—extra insurance policies that the dealerships could sell to their car-buying clients to protect for all sorts of damages and circumstances not covered by regular car insurance. It was great for the dealers and great for us; it amounted to basically nothing but profit in the long run because so few of these policies ever resulted in real claims. Talking a good game came easy to me. My Notre Dame connections and my little tale of sacking the quarterback in the final home game my senior year was a hook for just about anyone I met who was into sports. People loved my story! And when they loved my story, they almost always wound up buying whatever it was I was selling. It was pretty cool.
It wasn’t the most exciting or inspiring business to be in, of course. It was easy to get down. Easy to feel like I was just going through the motions. That’s pretty true for anyone working at a big company, I suppose. But Pat Ryan & Associates was great about doing little things to keep employee morale up, including sending each of us to training seminars. They were basically coaching sessions aimed at firing us up. Like pep rallies. And man-oh-man, did they work! I remember this one speaker who got up in front of this room full of insurance salesmen in shirts and ties and just about tore the roof off. He just had this way of talking, almost like a great preacher or a coach, that got us thinking big, dreaming big, imagining how much money we could be making if we really applied ourselves, really got to work, really thought outside the box and went after every sale like it was the most important sale on earth. He made us feel good about our career choices. He made us feel like we should be grateful and happy to be helping people and helping ourselves while working for a big powerful company and contributing to a team that included the best of the best in the business, which meant that each and every one of us were among the best of the best! By the end of that guy’s motivational speech, we were all on our feet cheering. We walked out of that boring beige hotel conference room like we were running out of the locker room into the Super Bowl. All just to sell insurance!
How the heck did that guy do that? I wondered. Man, I would love to be able to give talks like that someday!
I was so fired up, I started seeking out bigger, better assignments.
I was single and willing to travel, so the company started sending me all over the country to tackle the biggest jobs out there. All the while, my bank account kept growing. I cleared over $40,000 in a single year! This was the late 1970s. It was almost unimaginable.
All my life I dreamed of having that kind of money. All my life I dreamed of not wearing hand-me-down clothes, or driving on bald tires, or skimping on the food I bought. It was wonderful. Having money at my fingertips certainly made things easier.
I was off working in Baltimore, at a dealership with all kinds of problems, when my job started to lose its fire. I don’t know why. Maybe I needed another pep talk. Maybe I needed another seminar. Or maybe, just maybe, the fact that I was good at something and making good money at it wasn’t enough for me.
Maybe, I started to think, this isn’t my calling.
By the time Rocky II hit in June 1979, I was ready to move beyond my insurance career. I was ready to move on, period. The inspiration of Rocky, the idea that it’s possible to conquer your dreams, to drive your own fate, was amplified in that sequel, and I felt like it was time to find a sequel to all of that success I had unlocked at Notre Dame.
That’s when I turned the fantasy of making a movie based on my life into a dream. A dream I could work toward. I started writing down ideas for scenes. I had no idea how to write a screenplay, no idea how to get a screenplay made, who to call, or who to give it to. Didn’t matter. I started jotting these ideas down in a notebook. Started sketching out the way my story followed the arc of a movie. I thought back to that AP reporter, who said to me right after my teammates carried me off the field, “This only happens in Hollywood!” That guy had planted the seed in me right then and there! It felt like fate. It felt like destiny. It didn’t feel like a fantasy— something that would never actually happen; it felt like a dream in the same way playing Notre Dame football had been a dream, a distantly attainable dream.
Rudy: My Story Page 19