Rudy (14 page)

One day, I checked my mailbox at St. Joe's and found a letter with the Notre Dame insignia in the upper left-hand corner. The envelope was thin. I tore it open right there in front of my little mailbox slot and read those words no one ever wants to read: “We regret to inform you . . .”

I took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall. It stung. I was living the dream so thoroughly that I couldn't imagine it not coming true. Part of me also expected it, of course. I knew I had applied too soon. I knew I had to prove myself. I
was
proving myself. I was just a little impatient is all. So I tried to shake it off.

Calling my parents with the news wasn't fun. I don't think it made a difference to them if I didn't get into Notre Dame. They were blown away by the fact that I got into Holy Cross. But they were sad to hear the disappointment in my voice and concerned that maybe I had gotten my hopes up too high. I didn't want them to feel bad for me, but they did. I guess that's what parents are supposed to do. They worry about their kids. They don't want to see their kids get hurt. And I didn't want to see them get hurt!

The thing was, I wasn't really
hurt
. I knew I had applied too soon. Whatever frustration and loss I felt in that moment just sunk down into my gut, where it became a new batch of kindling.
By the end of this first year
, I told myself,
my progress will be so undeniable that Notre Dame will have to let me in!
It didn't take me long to get fired up all over again.

In fact, from that day on, I think it's pretty accurate to say I worked twice as hard: acing tests, slaying assignments, listening to and absorbing lessons, shunning the parties and girl-chasing that my younger peers were embracing and instead hiding away in the vestibule of St. Joe's peaceful white-painted chapel and concentrating, intently, on my studies. My schoolwork came first—day in, day out—almost without fail.

Don't get me wrong; I wasn't a saint, and I wasn't some stiff either. Freddy and I would go out to Corby's, a little Irish dive bar a few blocks south of campus, once in a while to blow off some steam. For someone so smart, Freddy had no idea how to talk to girls. He was super shy about it. So I helped him in that department, which was a little payback for all of his tutoring and academic help. I could talk to girls easily, mainly because I wasn't a threat. I didn't want anything from them, and they sensed that, so I became their friend. They knew they could trust me. I'm not sure why, exactly, other than that I was a little older, a little wiser in that department. I had done just enough running around after high school and in the navy, and I knew that I wanted to focus on what was important to me: my academics, getting into Notre Dame, and getting a spot on Ara Parseghian's football team. I think girls sensed that focus right away. That allowed them to talk to me without putting their guard up. I also found that girls at Notre Dame's sister school, St. Mary's, were more than willing to help me with my homework, which meant I wound up hanging around girls' dorms all the time. That's a pretty easy spot to meet girls—a whole building full of them. Whenever I could, I would set Freddy up.

We hit the town now and then with a guy I met in class at Holy Cross: Dennis McGowan, whom everyone affectionately calls “D-Bob.” D-Bob and I hit it off immediately. He's a real big guy with a life-of-the-party look about him. He's the kind of guy who could wear a Hawaiian shirt to a formal affair and get away with it. Not anything like the buttoned-up college students I expected to see at Holy Cross. At heart he was a comedian. “Class clown” barely touches the surface of just how funny this guy was. And he was funny in the context of a class on business law! So just imagine how he could make you laugh when we were at a bar.

D-Bob had enrolled at Holy Cross for the most practical reason imaginable: he wanted to learn more about business to improve the business he was already in. He and his family lived right there in South Bend, where D-Bob owned a sporting goods store. It was a total mess of a store. Customers would walk into the place and not know what to think. It looked like a tornado had passed through! But if you asked him for a certain running shoe in a certain size, he always knew exactly where it was, and he could recommend four other shoes that you might like even better. Because of that, his customers kept coming back. He was a fantastic salesman and a fantastic businessman in many ways; he was just completely unconventional and a little dysfunctional. As dysfunctional as D-Bob was in his store, his family was not. He was a little older than I was, married with kids. His family was fantastic, and he was fantastic with his family. They would come to embrace me as one of their own, just as I would embrace them as my second family outside of Joliet.

D-Bob and I helped each other. We supported each other through the ups and downs of daily life. We started making T-shirts together and selling them around campus to make some extra money. But most of all, we laughed. I needed that. Desperately. I had been putting too much pressure on myself. I needed a D-Bob in my life to give me a sense of humor, and I needed a Freddy to put me on the straight course. You can't have it all one way. You've gotta have a balance in life. Those two friends balanced me out like no others ever had. They balanced each other in a way too.

Unlike Freddy, D-Bob could have gotten any girl he wanted—and he did before he was married. He just had a way of talking that would turn girls woozy. It's a gift. A gift that makes it tough to stay in one relationship very long, that's for sure, but a gift nonetheless. So between the two of us, we'd wind up finding dates for Freddy all the time.

One last thing to note here about D-Bob: he was a big drinker. A little too big, if you know what I mean. And he knew it too. It's something we would address later on.

While I continued to press forward on the academic and friendship fronts, I also did whatever I could to stay focused on the football portion of my Notre Dame dream. The best way to do that was the same way I had in the navy and in between all those days at the power plant back in Joliet: by working out. I ran all over that campus every day. I also made my way into the weight room at the athletic civic center (the ACC) and bulked up.

The second way was to get as close to the team as I could. I couldn't get tickets to most games. They were all sold out. (So much for that “going to games whenever I want” dream I had when I first set eyes on Holy Cross.) So I picked up an extra job on the stadium maintenance crew. I couldn't believe how easy it was: I just walked up to the stadium one quiet afternoon when there was a crew out there working on the grass, I asked who was in charge, and someone pointed the man out. I told him I was at Holy Cross and wanted to get into Notre Dame, maybe even get onto the football team, and he hired me on the spot. It was the kind of work some people would call “grunt work”—picking up the ocean of garbage left behind in the bleachers, painting railings, trimming and edging the grass. But it sure didn't feel like grunt work. It felt like I was a part of history, helping to shape the beauty of that stadium where thousands of people, millions if you count TV, would watch the Fighting Irish play those Saturday home games.

One day I happened to notice a crew in the locker room painting the players' helmets, so I joined in. It was a group of Notre Dame football managers, the folks who take care of the uniforms and helmets and day-to-day logistical stuff for the team, and no one seemed to care that I wasn't a student. Once again, no one asked. I have to say, holding those game-ready helmets in my hand was a real treat. I liked that feeling of helping prep the team. Did you know they use real gold flakes in the paint? I learned that firsthand. I wasn't supposed to be doing it. Heck, I wasn't supposed to enter the locker room, that place where all the greats had stood, where the legendary Notre Dame coaches had given pep talks and speeches that would make their way into movies and onto records that kids all over America would memorize and play over and over in their bedrooms. I remember thinking,
I could be standing in the very same spot where Knute Rockne once stood!
I mean, you get to thinking about the history, the Four Horsemen, all of it. How could anyone keep me out of that place!

I never let the fear of getting caught get in my way. I felt like an integral part of the Notre Dame community and I just kept doing things as if I were a student. That's how confident I was in my ability to break down that wall and make my dream a reality. Nothing could stop me.

The third way I kept my head in the game was to actually get out there and play some football. Turns out Notre Dame has a massive inter-hall football league. We're not talking flag football. We're talking full-on, intramural tackle football. It's one of two colleges in the whole country where it happens; the other is the United States Military Academy at West Point. It's truly a dream for guys who thought their football careers were over after high school.

“Wait a second,” you may say. “What does Notre Dame's interhall league have to do with you, Rudy? You weren't at Notre Dame yet. You were at Holy Cross.” Well, the interhall teams were divided by dormitory. Our dormitory, St. Joe's, was on the Notre Dame campus. And when it came time to sign up, no one asked if we were Notre Dame students. Our hall designation was all anyone seemed to care about, so I signed up with a bunch of my fellow Holy Cross/St. Joe peers, and started practicing.

Man, did it feel good to strap on those pads and pull on that helmet after all those years. I think the league had fifteen teams in all, and with so many great athletes—I saw a statistic once that said one out of every five students at Notre Dame was a varsity captain of one sport or another in high school—the competition was serious. To this day the Notre Dame newspaper,
The Student Observer
, covers all of the interhall games, and the championship is held in Notre Dame Stadium! It's awesome.

I alternated between middle linebacker and fullback at our first practice. After all that working out in the navy, I was about as solid as a guy could get at that point in my life. So solid that I didn't think any of these guys would be able to tackle me. I was feeling pretty cocky! On the third play, the quarterback handed me the ball and I pushed through the line when a long-haired hippy-looking kid nailed me around the ankle and flipped me right over. That taught me a lesson in humility, that's for sure. The guy who tackled me was named Bo Potter, and he was a Holy Cross student with his eyes set on Notre Dame, just like me. We became friends after that moment. Funny how that sort of thing on the football field can bond people! He wasn't the only strong player either. Notre Dame defensive coordinator Joe Yonto's kids were on the team. At some other college, some of these guys might have been varsity players. Not at Notre Dame. Guys like George Gulyas and Fred Rodgers, Mike Flynn; all of 'em had big dreams and big goals, and they were walking through Holy Cross as a stepping-stone to bright futures.

None of us took the game too seriously, though. It was fun. It was kind of like baseball was in my younger days. We all played hard, but we enjoyed ourselves. In fact, there were times when I'd purposely try to make the guys laugh as a form of strategy. I'll never forget there was one varsity player on the Notre Dame team at that time who I considered a bit of a hero: Andy Huff, the fullback. The guy was a lot faster than me and more agile, but he was built like me. Stocky. Watching him play, just seeing that physicality on the field helped me envision myself on that team. So there were times when I'd get the ball in one of our interhall practices and yell, “Andy Huff coming through! Get out of my way! Here comes Andy Huff!” It would crack the guys up. They would laugh so hard they
couldn't
tackle me.

Those practices and those games were a great way to blow off some steam, and I had plenty of steam to blow off. It was frustrating having to wait, having to be patient. Assimilating into the Notre Dame world and yet constantly living under the threat of getting caught somewhere doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing wasn't all that fun, believe me. I just wanted to be at Notre Dame! I still harbored a lot of pent-up anger and frustration about the past too. About school. About my learning disorder. I mean, why did God want me to work twice as long and twice as hard as everyone else to get the grades I needed? I didn't understand it. As much as I tried to hide it and just enjoy every day at school, that frustration was definitely building.

One day, when I was out cleaning the aisles between the bleachers in the stadium, D-Bob came to find me. I was done with the work and had walked up high, to the very top seats in the southeast corner. I did that sometimes—just sat there looking out over the field, dreaming of what it would be like to play football for Notre Dame. I was in a fairly down mood, letting myself feed off of all of that frustration, when D-Bob came walking up.

“What's up? What're you doin' up here?” he asked.