Rudy (2 page)

Some people have the misperception that I was somehow born with more heart, more drive, and more passion to accomplish my dreams than the next guy. What I'm here to tell you is it's just not true. I found my heart, my drive, and my passion one step at a time, simply by growing up, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and pressing forward. Heck, I'm
still
making mistakes! In the past few years I made some business decisions that got me in a heap of trouble, but I overcame it and I learned from it and I'll open up about what happened right here in these pages for the very first time, in the hopes that you'll learn from it too. After all, I'm only human. Aren't we all? And we all make mistakes. The difference between those who reach their dreams and those who don't may just be a willingness to look at those mistakes and at all of life's obstacles from a new perspective.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that life is a journey. A long journey. And the lessons never stop coming. Big accomplishments, big successes, even big bank accounts don't stop that process. Not at all. To learn that life doesn't get easier just because you've reached a certain goal, accomplished a certain dream, or even had a movie made about your life story may be the toughest lesson of all. Life goes on, and so do life's challenges. You simply have to find a way to persevere and push through with all of the determination you can muster.

I don't have all the answers. I don't pretend to have all the answers. If you're looking for a self-help book filled with a lot of hot air, there are plenty of those books on the shelves. Go buy one. Instead, what I offer is the story of my life. A story that's far bigger and more complicated than any two-hour film could cover. (In fact,
Rudy
fans may be surprised to learn just how many of the stories from my life, even the people in my life, were compressed to their essence in order to serve the message and meaning of my journey on film. That's part of the Hollywood magic I'll share in these pages as well.)

What I offer instead is a story focused on a series of triumphs over seemingly insurmountable odds. A story that I hope will inspire you to take the hits and keep moving forward, to triumph over your own obstacles, and to dream bigger. 'Cause once that happens, once you find yourself dreaming bigger than ever before and leading the life you truly want to live, that's when you'll know that you've really dug deep and brought out the “Rudy” in you.

Part I
Growing Up

1
On the Ball

I was ten years old when I got my first glimpse.

I remember the hot vinyl seat searing the back of my legs as I sat toward the back of a school bus full of other young ball players, returning from a Little League field trip to a White Sox game up in Chicago.

The whole day had been amazing. Seeing those players take the field; actually witnessing my first live game; and stepping foot into a major league stadium and feeling the roar of that crowd was electrifying. Of course, every one of us kids from every one of those Joliet teams wore a glove to the game—just hoping and dreaming that we might be lucky enough to snag a foul ball as we sat in the stands. The thought of actually catching, touching, holding on to a major league baseball was about as big a thrill as my ten-year-old mind could imagine.

Then it happened. The wind-up. The pitch. The
clock
of the ball as it cracked off a Louisville Slugger, high and shallow down the left-field line, arcing foul and coming right for us! Every kid stood with his glove in the air. I remember squinting into the sun, doing everything I could to wish that ball directly into my hand. It came close! But I just couldn't reach it. One of the other team's coaches snagged that ball out of the sky as if it were tossed directly to him.

So there we were, rolling back toward Joliet, when that coach stood up and told everyone to quiet down. He stood at the front of the bus with that major league baseball in hand, tossing it and re-catching it a couple of times before holding it high above his head so every one of us could see it. “When we get back,” he said, “we're all gonna line up and I'm gonna throw this ball. And whoever gets it can have it.”

I nearly fell over. I wanted that ball more than anything I'd wanted in my entire life. The whole ride home, all I did was keep thinking about that ball.
A major league baseball! Mine for the taking!
I couldn't believe my luck.

My knees bounced up and down with anticipation as we pulled into Highland Park. As soon as that bus driver opened the door, we all burst out and ran onto the field. There must have been thirty of us boys all lined up at our home plate, staring out across the baseball diamond to the chest-high wooden fence at the back of the outfield, chomping at the bit to get this ball. Even so, I kept thinking,
That ball's mine
. It
was
mine. I knew it.

That coach got up in front of us on the pitcher's mound while the other coaches and a few of the parents who had come to pick us up corralled us into a straight line so it would be fair to everyone. “Ready?” he said.

“Yeah!” the kids all shouted.

“Are you ready?” he asked again.

“Yeah!” they all screamed louder. But not me. I was silent. I was focused on that ball, watching the red seam stitching go round and round as he turned it in his hand.

Satisfied by the enthusiasm of that final shout, the coach turned around; pulled his right arm back; lifted his left leg; took a big, exaggerated, hard step forward; and launched that ball in a massive arc all the way to the back of the outfield. I never took my eyes off it, even for a split second, even as my feet began to move beneath me. I wasn't conscious of just how fast I was running. I paid no attention to whether I was out in front or far behind those dozens of other competitors. All that mattered to me was that ball, and that ball was all I saw—even as it hit the ground in the neatly trimmed grass, took one hard bounce, and flew right over that fence to land in the overgrown mess of weeds on the other side. I watched that ball the whole way as I blew through the outfield and leaped over that fence like it wasn't even there. I was so focused, I didn't even stop to think about how to get over it—I just did it, as if I had leaped over a thousand fences before and knew exactly what to do. I knew just where that ball had landed. I knew which blades of tall grass and milkweed it landed behind, and I dove right through them, crashing to the ground and feeling that hard, round presence crush into my chest. I pulled my arms in, clutched that ball to me as I rolled over, sprung up from the ground, raised it high above my head and screamed, “I got it!”

Suddenly aware of the world around me, I noticed kids to my right and my left looking in the weeds in all the wrong places; a whole bunch of other players were still on the field or struggling to get over the fence. I left them in the dust. The fact that they were bigger than me, faster than me, and stronger than me didn't matter. I was kind of stunned by it. I remember having flashes of “What just happened?” and “How did I do that?” But what I really remember is the feel of that baseball in my hand. I was bolstered by the knowledge of where that ball came from and the undisputable fact that it now belonged to
me
. Squeezing the leathery weight of it just felt good.

That night, I placed that major league ball on the nightstand beside my bed, where I could see it from my pillow. The last object I would see before I fell off to sleep. I kept it there for years, unknowingly holding on to that feeling. Holding on to that tiny moment when I gave it my all and got exactly what I wanted. A feeling I would someday need to recapture: proof, in the form of a little round ball, that anything—
anything
—is possible.

I misplaced that ball somewhere in my travels through life. I've always hoped that someday it would show back up. But the memory and feeling of that ball will never be forgotten. It's embedded in my thoughts forever.

My mother always made us fold our underwear.

I know that's a strange thing to remember, and probably not one of the first things most people would mention when recalling their childhood, but I hated it. I hated the very thought of doing it. It made no sense to me.
Why would we waste time folding an article of clothing that we're only going to put in a drawer where no one will see it? Especially considering the fact that it goes on under our clothes!
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against folding underwear if that's what you're into. But to have it forced upon me as a kid seemed like some sort of unjust punishment.

Taking it one step further, my mother actually pressed our underwear before we got dressed for church on Sundays. She refused to let us leave the house without perfectly cleaned and pressed underwear. “Why are you doing that?” we'd ask her, and her reply was always the same: “In case you get in an accident on the way to mass.”

I can still picture my mother in the kitchen, clear as day, her tiny frame wielding that heavy iron with ease, standing there in a flower-print shirt, pressing our underwear and the dozens upon dozens of other items that just came off the clothesline—crooning old show tunes to herself while she did it, as if she enjoyed it. The funny thing is, I think she actually did. She had dreams of becoming a singer someday, and I don't think she ever stopped dreaming. You could hear her dream while she hummed, and there was something about putting those clothes in order and tackling that task, one skivvy at a time, that gave her a sense of peace. That inspired me. When she sang a song, she was relaxed and joyful. You could feel her energy and it relaxed our whole household.

In a house full of fourteen children, peace wasn't exactly easy to come by. In fact, my parents believed there was really only one way to find it: through order and discipline. So as far back as I can remember, order and discipline ruled in the Ruettiger house. My mother was in charge, every object had its place, every child had his or her duties, and breaking that sense of order meant you'd find your behind at the receiving end of my dad's big, strong hand—while bent over a hard wooden stool in the kitchen. (Often while mom continued ironing.)

I was the oldest boy in that massive family—my parents had seven boys and seven girls by the time they stopped having children—and let's just say up front that “order” and “discipline” were never my strong suits. My sisters have un-fond memories of me dressing up as a cowboy and bounding down the basement stairs, destroying their quiet attempts to play house by kicking over their makeshift toy kitchen sets. “Mom!” they'd scream. “Danny's doing it again!!” The spanking never deterred me. I'd keep coming back for more.

In fact, that's pretty much the story of my childhood.

My parents, Dan and Betty Ruettiger, married young, and like a lot of people in those days, they started having kids right away. After two back-to-back girls—my older sisters, Jean Ann and Mary Eileen—I came into the world on August 22, 1948. My mother would forget my birthday the very next year and celebrate it on August 23 instead—a date that would stick with me as a sort of pseudo-birthday from that day forward. I'm not sure why she forgot, but it stuck!

I was born Daniel E. Ruettiger (my whole family still calls me “Danny”), at St. Joseph's Hospital. Just like the rest of the clan, I was raised in the town where we were expected to grow old and die, the same town in which both of my parents had also been born and raised: the working-class Chicago suburb of Joliet, Illinois.

Joliet is a good forty-five-minute drive south of the city—far enough to seem like a world away when you're a kid. In fact, I have very few childhood memories of Chicago at all, despite the fact that it was so close. My memories tend to revolve around a one- or two-mile radius of our house. That was my world. Church. School. The park. The grocery store. The constant sound of train whistles blowing, and the functional, beautyless, hard-worn streets and buildings of America's working class.

My parents' first house at 206 South East Circle Drive had three tiny bedrooms squeezed into less than seven hundred square feet. There was a one-car garage set back and to the side, with our neighbors' houses (all equally small) just a few feet away on either side. As we got older, the little patch of grass under the willow tree out front became a meeting point for those neighbors. It was a spot where we'd play football together. Laugh together. It seemed big then.

It's difficult for me to remember the period before that house was packed full of brothers and sisters. And by full, I mean bursting-at-the-seams full. I was a freshman in high school before we would finally move to a bigger house, and by then there were ten kids in our family. Imagine, just for a moment, trying to squeeze all of that pent-up energy into the four walls of that little yellow box of a post–World War II track home on the edge of a cornfield. One bedroom for the boys, one for the girls; bunk beds crammed together in each. In between sleep and school came what can only be described as resounding (if somewhat controlled) chaos.