But I also had a more immediate dream: to quit the insurance business and go to work for myself. It almost didn’t matter what business I went into. I just wanted to be my own boss. I was tired of answering to someone else all the time. I was tired of not knowing when and if I might get transferred to some other part of the country. I was fed up with the same old routines and fed up with being a salesman. It seemed like I spent 90 percent of my day getting turned down. “No! . . . No thanks . . . Let me think about it and call you tomorrow . . . Sorry, no.” Any great salesman will tell you it takes a ton of no’s to get to one yes, but that process is tiring. Exhausting. I was ready for a change.
I remember watching the crew that came into the car dealership in Baltimore to buff the floors each night. I found out what kind of money those guys were getting paid, and it was pretty good. I had plenty of experience picking up soda pop and all kinds of sticky stuff at the Notre Dame stadium and helping around the ACC. It seemed like the kind of work I could get into without any training, and there were certainly lots of offices and businesses that needed cleaning crews. Selling businesses on hiring me would be a heck of a lot easier than selling insurance. And the work would be good. Manual labor. A start and a finish. Not these endless days of just getting to the next sale.
So I jumped in with both feet. I started picking up side jobs while continuing the insurance gig. I convinced a guy to let me live at his warehouse while I got my act together and bought the equipment I needed. I was scraping it all together and making things work however I could, just like I did back at Notre Dame. As weeks went by, more work started to come my way. I needed help and added a couple of guys to my crew. I actually enjoyed buffing floors, at least for a while. There was something meditative and pensive about it. Holding that machine, listening to that whir, my mind would wander—and it almost always wandered to my movie idea. I just couldn’t let it go. I kept picturing my life from the outside, through a camera. I thought of splicing the pieces of my life together like splicing the practice films back at Notre Dame, putting the pieces in order so they all made sense. The people in my life started to come alive to me in a whole new way, like characters on a screen.
I made sure to do top-notch work everywhere I went, hoping that my good work would shine bright enough to attract the attention of other clients and garner strong word-of-mouth recommendations from the clients I had. It was tiring, juggling the two gigs. But it worked. A few months into it, I picked up a chance to take on a major client—a client that would require me to hire a real crew; buy bigger, better equipment; and really turn this thing into a full-fledged cleaning business with me at the helm. The income it would produce would allow me to quit the insurance business for good. There was just one problem: in order to get started, I’d need a chunk of cash up front.
I wasn’t real good with saving my money. I had never had money before, and I enjoyed spending what I had. I didn’t have enough history or any kind of a business plan that would allow me to go to a bank for a small business loan. So I really only had one choice: I had to find myself an investor. Someone willing to loan me the money and let me pay them back, with interest, of course, when I could.
There was only one person I could think of who might be willing to do that. So I hopped a plane back to South Bend and went to see my Mickey: Ara Parseghian.
Parseghian heard me out. He listened to my plan. He loved the fact that I had already landed this big contract even though I didn’t have the money to get the job done. It was forward thinking. It was risky. But he also knew how hard of a worker I was, and that I wouldn’t let him down. Parseghian was involved in an insurance business of his own at the time, with a business partner. He didn’t even take time to think about it. He heard me out and right then and there he turned to his partner and said, “Write him a check. Rudy’s gonna make it.” When his partner asked how he could be so sure and wondered whether or not they should take a day to think on it, Parseghian said, “No. I coached him. I’ve seen how hard he works. He’s gonna do this.”
The deal I made with Parseghian was a handshake deal. There wasn’t any contract. There weren’t any lawyers involved. It was simple. He was a man of his word. I was a man of my word. That’s all that mattered. We shook on it, and the deal was done.
I was pumped! With twenty grand in my pocket, I high-tailed it back to Baltimore and bought everything I needed. I put my crew together and lined everything up. I got behind one of those buffers, always a part of the team, showing my workers how dedicated to the job each and every one of us had to be in order to make this company shine, and we buffed, and polished, and swept, and mopped, and repeated that process day in and day out, working nights when the workplaces were empty and the rest of the world was out grabbing a beer and watching the game on TV.
Then suddenly, eight months later, I woke up one morning with a start. What the heck am I doing?! I wondered. I thought about the backbreaking night before and looked ahead to the backbreaking day in front of me and realized that I no longer enjoyed running this little company at all. Here I had created a wildly successful, already profitable business, almost overnight, and I couldn’t stand being in charge of it. It was too much pressure. I couldn’t think of anything else. I had started to let my movie dreams slide in favor of budgeting and schedules. I needed to change that. But I couldn’t just drop it and not pay the loan back to Parseghian.
I’ve gotta sell this sucker!
I had met a guy with a fire in his belly who kept peppering me with questions about how quickly I’d grown my business. He owned a fire clean-up business, the kind of operation where they come in after a fire or other disaster and remove all the smoke and damage. That was a great business, but it was unpredictable. No steady client stream. What he needed to augment his business was a steady routine, like the one I had developed. I went to him and offered to sell him all of my contracts for twenty-five grand. “Yeah!” he said, and we signed the deal in a matter of hours. I gave Ara his principal back, but with no interest. I needed to keep that extra money to live on, and he respected that. As part of the deal, I stayed on for a couple of years running the cleaning side of things for the new owner. Knowing that I wasn’t the real boss anymore felt like someone had released a pressure valve on the top of my head. Funny how after years of wanting to be my own boss, the demands of that particular career turned out to be a little more than I bargained for. Once all that steam went out, I suddenly had space to think about my real dream again: the dream of making my movie.
It’s a strange thing when you talk about your dreams, especially big, far-out dreams like mine. Some people laugh. Some people think it’s really cool, but then the conversation moves on to something in their own lives and that’s the end of it. Then every once in a while someone gets so fired up about your dream that it unlocks a dream of their own. Those people are fun to be around.
During my time in Baltimore I met a high school coach. Great guy. Enthusiastic, fun to be around, great coach who believed in inspiring his kids to be their best. When I told him my story, he went nuts for it! He loved inspirational movies, and he was a total movie junky. We would ride around in the car, go to lunch, meet up for a beer somewhere, and spend the whole time talking about Hollywood and the great movies we’d seen, trying to pick apart what it was that made certain movies so great, so powerful, so emotional. He asked me if he could help write a script for my story, and he was so pumped up about it, how could I say no? I suddenly had a partner in this, a partner who took it as seriously as I did.
That coach did a whole bunch of studying and reading up about the art of writing screenplays, and then the two of us would get together and write. Mostly I would talk, he would type, and we’d just put stuff down on paper. He’d show it to me, we’d edit it; we’d rework it ’til it felt good, reading the parts out loud to each other as if we were actors. We didn’t really know what we were doing. It didn’t matter. It was fun. And by the time my contract with the cleaning company was up, by
the time I decided it was time for me to get the heck out of Baltimore and try to pursue this movie with everything I had, the coach and I had completed a screenplay that was nearly two hundred pages long. It didn’t even feel hard! Working on it a little bit at a time the way we did, it just happened. It didn’t feel like work.
It wasn’t a very good screenplay, and we never wound up doing anything with it. As time went on, I would learn that a screenplay translates to about one minute of screen time per page, on average. Which means the movie he and I developed would have been over three hours long! Something in the range of 90 to 110 pages would have been more appropriate. But how the heck could you fit a whole story into ninety pages? I wondered. It seemed like a complete mystery.
What wasn’t a mystery was my desire to go to the place where I thought I would find lots of support for this movie. No, not Hollywood. Not New York. I’m talking about a place steeped in the traditions that flooded my story. A place full of history and pride and a reverence for the ideals and the positive message I wanted my movie to promote.
Of course, I wouldn’t be moving anywhere without a job and some income. So the first thing I did was go crawling back to the insurance company to ask for my old job back. Luckily for me, they remembered who I was, and I didn’t burn any bridges when I left. After seeing the initiative I had taken in starting my own successful business, they even did me one better: they promoted me to district manager. So leaving that job, taking that risk, taking that leap, following my gut on the way in, and on the way out, yielded positive results all around. I learned from it, wound up better off because of it. No harm, no foul. It was nerve-racking and a little worrisome at times to have my life in that kind of flux. But I was very glad I did it.
There was one more very important benefit to come from that whole endeavor: now that I was a manager, the insurance company agreed to let me manage the Michigan/Indiana territory. And that assignment allowed me to move back and set up my home base in exactly the place I wanted to be for the sake of getting my movie made: South Bend, Indiana.
14
Chalk Talk and Hollywood Dreams
It was 1986 when I bought my first condo about a mile from the Notre Dame campus. Ten years had come and gone in what felt like ten minutes. It had been ten years since I threw my graduation cap into the air and walked out wondering, What now?
A decade of my life had flown by, and I still didn’t feel like I had the answer to that question. I had a dream. I had my movie. And that was enough to keep me going. But putting that dream first was hard. It’s hard to do that. It’s hard to keep a dream alive when life and all of its worries are in the way. How was I supposed to find time to work on a movie idea when my job kept me on the road, traveling, selling, filing paperwork, making phone calls, taking phone calls, and attending meetings, seminars, and more? Let alone finding some personal time to spend with friends, or even think about dating or settling down. It’s a wonder anyone ever finds a way to turn a dream into reality. When years go by, and nothing happens, it’s easy to just forget about it.
But that’s the one thing I never, ever did. I never, ever let myself forget about my dream. One way I did that was to tell everyone I knew all about it. I basically went around blabbing to anyone who would listen that I was going to make a movie about my life. If they knew my story already, they would either believe it and support my dream, or they wouldn’t. No skin off my back. If they didn’t know my story, I would tell it to them; and in all those years of telling my story, the tale of where I came from, of how I pursued my dream, of making it onto the football team and then getting on that field and sacking that quarterback in the final moments of our final home game, to get carried off the field for the first time in Notre Dame history . . . the story never failed. I never met one person who didn’t get excited by it, who didn’t say, “Man! That really is a movie!” Not one.
That’s what kept me going. That’s what kept my dream alive, even in the face of real-life rejection.
One of the first things I did in South Bend was to bring my movie idea to a series of administration officials at Notre Dame. A lot of them liked the story. They loved my enthusiasm. I had it in my head that my movie would be really good PR for Notre Dame—after all, it would be a heartwarming movie with a positive message, I told them. I even went to the PR department with this idea in my head that they might be willing to fund part of the movie, because it would send such a strong message to potential students.
That whole idea turned out to be a fantasy. Notre Dame was doing just fine in the PR department. The school had more applicants than they could ever desire. They liked their elite position in the world, and it became very clear that the idea of doing a film about some kid who didn’t really accomplish that much, who came into the university through a junior college in his junior year, just wouldn’t cut the mustard. Plus, they hadn’t let a film crew step foot on campus for almost fifty years—not since the filming of Knute Rockne: All American—and the legacy of that film was strong enough to carry Notre Dame throughout history, as far as the administration was concerned. They weren’t going to let Hollywood play around with their image. So no matter how many times I went back, they simply wouldn’t read the script, and they rejected the notion that they would ever allow another film to be shot on campus. The final decision seemed to rest with the University Relations department, and their polite but firm message to me basically amounted to, “Get lost!”
I suppose a lot of people would have given up the dream at that point. I mean, if the school where your dream movie is set doesn’t want you and says it’s never going to happen, then what good is the dream, right?
Don’t forget, though: everything about Notre Dame had been a closed door to me from the very beginning. When it came to that school, I had learned through experience that “no” simply didn’t mean “no.” What I had to do was find a side door, maybe even find the secret keys in order to step inside that castle. My film wasn’t ready yet, anyway. I had time. And that’s always a good thing.
So as ridiculous and unrealistic and impossible as it seemed that Rudy Ruettiger could get a movie made about his life story, that dream never died. Not even for a moment. Not even while it sat dormant, covered in frost, while I worked hard just to pay my bills and to learn to stand on my own two feet in South Bend.
Coincidently or not, another film came along the very same year I returned to Indiana, a film that would fire me up and inspire me all over again to keep going: Hoosiers. An underdog story, on lots of different levels. A small-town Indiana high school basketball team. A coach with a questionable past. A town drunk. A victory as powerful as Rocky’s, with a positive message that brought audiences to their feet. It was just what I wanted my own movie to be. I knew the elements were there. I just wished with all my heart I could find the right people to help me bring it to life.
What I should have done is taken notes. I should have sat there in the theater and watched the credits and written down the names of every person who helped make that film. I should have sought those geniuses out one by one. I wasn’t smart enough to do that. Not yet. Maybe the process would have been shorter if I had. It’s strange, but in some ways, I didn’t think of movies being made by individuals. The whole thing seemed so big. “Hollywood” seemed more like an untouchable entity than just a bunch of individuals doing good work and forming teams to get that work to the big screen. I didn’t understand any of it yet.
Things happen in their own time anyway. God has a plan. I have no doubt about that. The thing I needed from Hoosiers at that moment, in the fall of 1986, was the inspiration—and maybe a sign—to tell me that I was headed in the right direction and let me know that the powerful, positive message I could send with my personal story would be valued. After all, Hoosiers wound up being a big hit, nominated for multiple Academy Awards. This was the ’80s, when every other film in theaters seemed to be about a big adventure, special effects, teenage drug use, or sex. And yet this little film
with a positive message about a basketball team won the hearts of audiences all across America. If I could make a film with that much heart and that much inspiration—a film that was anything like Hoosiers or Rocky—I knew for sure I’d have a winner on my hands.
Even with all those thoughts rattling around my brain, I never could have imagined just how much of an influence Hoosiers would have on my life. A few years later, that film would be the key to everything. Everything.
Life in South Bend for me was a lot like life at Notre Dame: I was happy to be there, appreciative of the whole situation, and able to share my enthusiasm just about everywhere I went. I talked to people. Everybody. The shop clerks, the waiters and waitresses, the Notre Dame faculty, the townspeople, the garbage men, the legendary local barber, Armando, who cut all the football coaches’ hair in his old-fashioned meeting-place style barber shop. I introduced myself to new Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, and I got to know some of the legendary players from my youth, including 1966 champion Bob Gladieux, who became my roommate at the condo that year. A lot of people I met around town knew my story. They knew the legend of Rudy. They wanted to help me. There was a priest from outside of Notre Dame who offered to help me turn my story into a book. Players wanted to introduce me to people they knew who were involved in the movie-making business. It was great!
In fact, it was another legendary Notre Dame player who suggested I bring my story to Jason Miller.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Did you ever see The Exorcist?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Jason’s the guy who played the priest.”
It struck me as a little strange. I remembered the movie really well. I remembered what the priest in the movie looked like, with his dark hair and big soulful eyes. But why would some actor be the right guy to write my movie?
Rudy: My Story Page 20