Rudy: My Story

by Rudy Ruettiger

  Turns out that Jason Miller won a Pulitzer Prize for writing That Championship Season, the 1972 play that had recently been turned into a film starring Robert Mitchum—the story of four guys who get together with the old coach of their championship basketball team to relive their glory days back in the ’50s. A sports movie that wasn’t really about sports at all, but about life and drama and who we are as people. It was really deep stuff. Jason Miller was a personal friend of this new acquaintance of mine, and he was a Notre Dame nut!

  I was floored. The idea that I might be able to get my story into the hands of a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer never even occurred to me. Maybe I hadn’t been dreaming big enough!

  A little time went by and we set up a meeting. I drove to Scranton, which is this scrappy, blue-collar place full of brick buildings and big old stone churches, and when Jason Miller came around the corner I thought I was in The Exorcist! It really took me back. He looked just like the priest in the movie. I don’t know what I expected, but it really knocked me over for a second. “Hey, Rudy,” he said, and he was a real nice guy. No twisting heads or projectile vomiting. “Let’s go to my favorite bar,” he said, and we went off to this real working-class place full of coal miners. Rather than tell him my story in a private corner where no one could hear us, I started telling my story within earshot of all these hard-working guys with beers in their hands—and they were riveted. I built the whole thing, just telling my story from start to finish, and when I got into the stadium with those last five seconds to play, and the crowd chanting my name, and I dove in to sack the quarterback, those coal miners cheered!

  It was awesome.

  “You got a story, Rudy,” Jason said to me, grabbing my hand in a big, firm handshake. “We’re gonna write it.”

  I wasn’t sure who the “we” was at first, until he introduced me to his ghostwriter. Jason’s talents were in storytelling and acting, so the way he liked to work in those days was to dictate to a ghostwriter who would then go off and write and polish the raw ideas. They were right in the middle of working on another movie project at the time, but they promised not to put mine on the back burner. They loved the story, and Jason insisted he could handle it.

  I went home feeling like I’d just sacked the quarterback all over again. Truly, I couldn’t have imagined a better outcome, a better meeting, a better plan, a better alignment. It’s like everything fell into place. Jason really was a Notre Dame nut. He knew Ara Parseghian backward and forward and could stand up and imitate his mannerisms, his voice, everything! It was uncanny. I remember thinking he should play Parseghian in the film. But mostly, I thought he was the perfect guy to get inside my story and bring out the heart of it. He was passionate. Creative. Perfect for this. I felt it in my bones.

  Six months went by, and I never heard another word. I kept calling Jason to see what was up, and he kept saying he needed just a little more time. I was so impatient! This was my life story. I felt like I’d already been waiting ten years for this thing to get off the ground. I didn’t want to wait anymore!

  Finally, Jason came to visit me in South Bend. He brought his son, Jason Patric, along and the whole gang had tickets to a Notre Dame football game. It turned into quite a party, actually. Jason Patric, of course, is a talented actor in his own right, the maternal grandson of Jackie Gleason, and one heck of a good-looking guy. He was dating a young actress named Julia Roberts at the time—yes, that Julia Roberts!—and he brought her along to a little post-game gathering at my condo. I really didn’t know who she was at the time so it didn’t affect me. I didn’t talk to her all that much, but she seemed real nice. And who could ever forget that smile, or that laugh of hers. When I found out later who she was, I almost fell out of my chair! Seeing her on screen, I remember thinking her smile was as big off screen as it was on. Their agent was with them, who was a really powerful person in the film business at the time. It’s like all of Hollywood came to my doorstep! Some people might get nervous in that kind of a situation, but not me. I think it goes back to the fact that I just like talking to everybody. It doesn’t matter what people do for a job or how successful they are. At the heart of it, we’re all people, and we’ve all got our struggles and passions. They were all passionate people, which is always fun to be around, and they were so fired up about my story. It felt like progress. I felt like this whole movie thing was really on the verge of taking off.

  The very next day, Hollywood left town and the excitement seemed to leave with it. As the weeks flew by, it simply felt like Jason might never get around to writing, and a call from his ghostwriter basically confirmed my hunch. He just had too many other things going on. So I wound up hiring that ghostwriter myself. He moved into my condo in South Bend, and I agreed to pay him one-thousand dollars a month to work on the script. I was still selling insurance, traveling around to twenty-six different car dealerships spread over three states. It was exhausting. But knowing that ghostwriter was back at my place working diligently on my real dream kept me going.

  There was just one problem: after a few months, it became clear to me that the “work” that ghostwriter was doing wasn’t so “diligent.” His girlfriend had moved in with him. The progress on the script was way too slow. Then one day I came off the road to find him and his girlfriend fighting in my kitchen . . . and my kitchen was on fire. Literally on fire! They were yelling and screaming at each other while the stove burst with flames behind them. I grabbed the extinguisher and put it out, and right there in the middle of that hazy cloud of white and smoke, I told him he needed to leave. “Forget the screenplay,” I said. “Just get out of here.”

  The two of them packed up and left the next day. I was floored. I felt like a fool.

  It seemed every attempt I made to partner up with someone to get this movie made turned out to be a mistake. And yet, there were always moments that kept me going. Even with that ghostwriter, the journey wasn’t over. We reconnected, and he apologized, and he wound up bringing a major producer on board: Frank Capra Jr., the son of the great director of It’s a Wonderful Life, among other classics. After feeling so low, that lifted my spirits right up!

  Capra wanted to meet with the powers that be at Notre Dame to make sure we’d have all the clearances we would need to shoot this film on campus. After all, Notre Dame was as big a character in the movie as I was. We would need to capture the look and feel of that campus, and there was no way to reproduce that anywhere else—especially in what would be viewed as a fairly low-budget movie. This wasn’t Star Wars. We weren’t going to be building a fake Notre Dame set on a studio lot somewhere. Without the real Notre Dame as the setting, the whole film just wouldn’t work. Everyone agreed on that.

  I put in a call to University Relations, told them Capra was on board, and asked if they’d take a meeting to discuss the project. Lo and behold, they agreed!

  Capra took the red-eye in from L.A. just for the meeting. A bunch of us sat in this little conference room at Notre Dame, pumped up about the possibilities and psyched to get this thing off the ground, when suddenly a Notre Dame official came in and said the meeting was over. They were sticking by their original decision not to let any more movies be shot on campus.

  My emotional whiplash continued.

  We all sat there in stunned silence. I think I was the first to finally speak up and apologize to everyone. I had no idea that meeting would go the way it did. I felt like a fool. Like I’d wasted everyone’s time, not to mention their money.

  After a bit of discussion, Capra looked at me and said, “Rudy, they’re not going to listen to us. The only person who can get this movie done is you.” He told me I shouldn’t rely on ghostwriters or anyone else to get the deal done from this point forward. I was the one with the connection to the school and to the football team. I was the one who had the perseverance to make my story a reality, and I was the only one who would have the perseverance to see to it that my movie would ever get made.

  I knew he was right. I had been
leaning on the knowledge and experience of others. I had been leaving my fate in the hands of other people, just because I was too naive and too busy with the rest of my life to take the time to really do my due diligence and figure out how to make my dream a reality on my own. I needed to take charge.

  I never heard from Capra again after that. I simply retreated into my life and started thinking about what would come next.

  The first thing I had to do was find a way to stabilize my day-to-day existence. I was on the road too much. The insurance business was eating me up—the same way it had been eating me up back in Baltimore. I loved going to sales meetings. I loved standing in front of a bunch of guys who were eager to make some money, and getting them fired up about the job. I would talk to ’em like a coach at halftime, digging deep, pulling out all sorts of energy and feeding off of their energy in return. But when it came to the rest of it, the organization and paperwork, the constant traveling, it wasn’t my calling. I needed to find a way out.

  Funny how when you really need something, when you’re asking for it and praying for it, certain opportunities will fall right into your lap. It might not be the exact thing you were imagining. But as long as you’re paying attention, that thing could be the opportunity that rescues you and sends you in the direction of your dreams.

  No sooner did I start thinking about getting out of the insurance business again than the owner of a car dealership right there in South Bend offered me a job. He saw what kind of a salesman I was. He knew my reputation. He knew my story. He had heard about the way I fired up my sales team—and he wanted me to pour that energy into his business. He asked me if I’d like to become the new car sales manager at his dealership. A dealership that was two miles from the Notre Dame campus. The one dealership in town where all the coaches and Notre Dame staff seemed to go for all of their new-car needs.

  “Heck ya, I would!” I said, and the deal was done. No more traveling. No more wasting hours and hours driving all over creation. No more insurance.

  For a while, my film dream went back under the frost. I knew spring would come again. I never let the dream die. In fact, I kept a copy of the latest script that ghostwriter and I had put together tucked in my top desk drawer at the car dealership. I wasn’t sure when it would happen, but I knew that at some point, my movie dream would sprout up from the ground once again. In the meantime, I dedicated all of my energy to being the best new car sales manager that dealership had ever seen. Part of me knew that it still wasn’t my calling. It wasn’t what I was meant to be doing in life. But it was good work. Solid work. It provided me with a really good living. In fact, I earned enough that I bought myself a much better condo, a townhouse with a deck just perfect for barbecuing. I made friends all over town and stayed in touch with the Notre Dame crowd by hooking them up with the best deals I could.

  One day, toward the very tail end of the 1980s, one of my salesmen came to me all worried and upset, looking for help. “I can’t close this guy,” he said. He had a customer on the floor who really liked a particular car, but he didn’t like the price and was ready to walk out the door. This salesman really needed this sale. So I told him to bring the customer in to see me.

  The guy looked at the name on my door as he walked in, and he stuck out his hand. “Rudy,” he said, “I graduated when you graduated. You fought in the Bengal Bouts and played in that football game. Boy, you were a real inspiration around campus.”

  Spring had sprung.

  The fact that a fellow graduate remembered me and thought of me as an inspiration reminded me what I needed to do. And from that moment forward, I once again began my quest to turn my movie dream into a reality.

  I contacted all sorts of old friends and various Notre Dame alumni, and found that almost anyone I spoke to was willing to try to help if they could. I wound up making trips to California on the weekends, to take meetings and lunches and coffees with all sorts of Hollywood characters—friends of friends of various alumni, none of which seemed all that interested in helping me, and instead wanted to know if I could help them. It struck me that my career as an insurance salesman had prepared me for all of that rejection. I heard “no” a hundred times a day, for years, so I didn’t let any of the negativity get me down. I just chalked it up to experience and learned firsthand what that town was all about: Hollywood was full of dreamers and not a lot of doers, it seemed.

  In the meantime I started holding regular gatherings at my new condo. I had sort of an open-door policy on Thursday nights, and whoever wanted to stop by was welcome. We’d throw on some barbecue, watch a football game on TV, watch movies, and just sit around talking—whoever showed up. My old pal D-Bob was always there. So was his buddy Paul Bergan, a great educator and renowned high school football coach in Michigan (who would be inducted into the Michigan High School Football Coaches’ Hall of Fame in 1991), whom I had met when I was a student and became great friends with as an adult. Young, old, alumni, a bunch of the current players from the Notre Dame team who wanted to get away from it all and blow off some steam, and even out-of-towners and well-known individuals would hear about Thursdays at Rudy’s and want to stop by the condo: guys like Jerome Bettis, Roger Clemens, and President Ford’s son, Jack Ford. It was amazing who’d come walking through that door, and the connections that were made. My buddy LeShane Saddler, a student and football player at Notre Dame at the time (who became a high school teacher and who now works in the Notre Dame admissions office), met a girl named Kellie who lived upstairs from me, and the two of them wound up getting married. So the connections ran deep! I felt like some sort of matchmaker, like I’d helped shape this guy’s future just by giving him a place to hang out. My condo was simply a good place to relax, have fun, and talk. And almost every week we’d wind up talking about my story, envisioning the movie, imagining what actors could play which roles. All of a sudden there were a whole bunch of people dreaming about the movie version of my life. It was wild.

  Some of those friends and acquaintances would open up about their own dreams too, from playing in the NFL, to buying a house in one of the more exclusive parts of town—whatever it was, everyone knew that Rudy’s condo was a judgment-free zone, and a place where dreams could be spoken out loud. There was magic in that. Looking ahead, making plans for things that weren’t quite real yet all of us were aiming for. It was almost like a lowbrow version of the “salons” I’d read about in school— like back in the 1800s, where a bunch of intellectuals or authors would gather around and share ideas and stories, and inspire each other to do great work. Only we didn’t think of it in those kinds of terms. We called it “Chalk Talk.” We’d be sitting there with a big white board, sketching ideas for my film, or whatever the topic of the day was. It was kind of like sitting in the locker room in front of a blackboard, planning plays for upcoming games. The games weren’t real yet. You never knew how things would unfold in real time, under real circumstances, but that didn’t stop you from planning. You’d grab a piece of chalk and go ahead and set things into motion as if they were real, right there in that moment, and whoever held the chalk held the floor. That’s exactly what “Chalk Talks” at my condo were all about—except we weren’t talking about a game. We were talking about our real lives, our real goals, and our real ambitions, no matter how far-out those ambitions seemed to be.

  I also started talking up my movie idea around town again—to anyone who would listen, from the mailman to a local hotel manager. They all loved hearing about it. People get caught up in dreaming. We all love to see enthusiasm in someone else, and so many people I talked to got caught up in this positive, forward-thinking attitude I let flood back into my life. I felt like I had people rooting for me everywhere I went. Even at work: I’d wind up talking about my movie to the sales team, to certain customers, with clients on the phone.

  One guy who wound up being a customer of mine was an assistant coach at Notre Dame. A guy by the name of Barry Alvarez. He had heard of me before he came into the dealers
hip, and he asked me, “Why are you selling cars?”

  “’Cause I’m gonna make a movie someday,” I said. That was my answer! I knew this car thing was just paying the bills. I knew it.

  “What kind of a movie?” he asked. And I told him: not just a movie about my personal story, my life’s journey, but of the inspiration behind that story, and the message I hoped to share with other kids who are looking for a way to move forward in life.

  “Wow,” he said. “You’re really gonna do that. I can feel it.”

  I loved getting that kind of support.

  “Well, what are you gonna do, Coach? I bet you’re not going to be an assistant coach your whole life,” I said.

  “Nope, I’m gonna be a head coach. I’m a dreamer, like you, Rudy. Just watch me.”

  Those were the kind of conversations I’d have. The movie dream just followed me wherever I went, all the time. And it felt great—despite all those fruitless trips to Hollywood and the lack of what most people would consider any real progress toward making that dream come true.

  I’m not sure what was driving me. It was just a feeling in my gut. One of those gut feelings that I’ve spoken about before. Those gut feelings that I firmly believe are the voice of God, and need to be heeded. I felt as if I was doing the right thing. I felt like I was making progress. I trusted that feeling.

  Well, lo and behold, that feeling was right.

  One day, one of those random people I had shared my story with, a local hotel manager, called me up on the phone. “Rudy, my brother’s coming to town and you need to meet him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, to be honest, he was roommates with Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh back at Indiana University. Do you know who they are?” he asked.

  I had no idea.

  “They’re the guys who wrote and directed the movie Hoosiers,” he told me. “I got talking to him about you, and he thinks you have a valid story to tell.”