Rudy (25 page)

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!

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!