Rudy (21 page)

The only solution I could think of was to work hard and try to make an impression. I played as hard as I ever had. I gave my all, over and over again, no matter how tired I was or how much it hurt. I reminded myself, every day, what a privilege it was to be a part of that team. I seemed to make an impression on offensive coordinator Merv Johnson. He would throw out little comments like, “Great effort! . . . Nice job!” I loved that stuff. He seemed to love how hard I made his guys work, which only made me want to work even harder.
Heck
, I thought,
if these new coaches really notice, maybe I' ll see my name move up the depth chart and I' ll finally get to play!

I said good-bye to my great friend Freddy at the end of that year. Just as he dreamed, he was heading off to law school in Florida. He was one of the few people in the entire Notre Dame community with whom I had shared my dream of dressing for a game. I was smart enough to know that most people would tell me it was impossible, so I kept my mouth shut, just as I did back in Joliet when I finally made up my mind to quit my job at the power plant and go find a way into Notre Dame. I didn't want to hear all that negative talk. Lucky for me, Freddy—just like D-Bob—never tried to dissuade me. They were both convinced I could do it. And even though he'd be thousands of miles away, Freddy said he'd do everything he could to come back and see me play if I ever got suited up. That meant a lot to me. I was so proud that he was accomplishing his dreams and so happy to have met a guy like him, purely by chance, on my very first day at St. Joseph Hall. I believe certain people come into your life for a reason, and I knew I had better pay attention to make sure I didn't miss another “Freddy” if he or she ever came along.

That summer I moved back home to Joliet and took a construction job as a plasterer. I wasn't qualified to do the detail work, so I took on all the low-level jobs: setting up scaffolding, mixing mud, carrying stuff back and forth to the truck. I liked to do the heavy lifting because it kept me in shape for football, and doing all that grunt work made the other guys happy, simply because they didn't have to do it! All those plasterers chewed tobacco. I had never tried it, and one day I said, “I want to chew some.” They said I wasn't man enough, but I fought back, saying I'd been in the navy. Give me a shot. So I tried it, and man, I got so sick! I vomited everywhere, and those guys just laughed and laughed. “Oh yeah, the tough Notre Dame football player!” they said. I never did that again.

The highlight of that summer came in the mailbox. I wasn't expecting it. I wasn't anticipating it. But there in the mail, one afternoon, I spotted a letter with the Notre Dame insignia on it—only this one wasn't from the admissions office. It was from the football team.

Inside was a letter inviting me to come back early to join the varsity team for fall training. I couldn't believe it! It was so out of the blue. I had hoped to make an impression, but this felt as big as my acceptance letter to Notre Dame: it meant I was a full-fledged member of the football team now. Not a walk-on player, but a true member of the team.

Showing that letter to my dad was just as exciting as sharing the news when I first got in. He got really excited too. There were certain guys at work who still ribbed him about his son not showing up anywhere on their TVs and radios during the Notre Dame games. They refused to admit that a Ruettiger was part of the Notre Dame legacy, and they ribbed him about it. My dad wasn't the kind of guy who'd go running into work with that letter in hand to shout over a loudspeaker and let everyone know that his son was a full-fledged member of the football team now, but I knew that he'd carry that confidence with him the next time he stepped foot into that refinery.

That made me proud.

11
Never Quit

The scout team doesn't travel to away games.
The only shot I'd have at dressing for a game in the fall of 1975 was at home, and that shot was most definitely a long one. Despite my dreams, I hadn't moved up the depth chart. Not one bit. I'd walk by the list outside of the locker room every day and not see my name on it. No scout team players were listed. So there was no indication that I was even a part of the team, despite my new “official” status. It frustrated me so much that I started writing my name on the bottom of the depth chart just so I could see it. One day, one of the team managers caught me doing it. Luckily, I knew those guys. The managers were sort of the business managers of the team. They took care of all of the logistical details, and I was always friendly with them, just hanging around and talking to them outside the locker room from time to time. Because I lived in the ACC, I could always make sure they had whatever they needed on short notice. Little stuff like that. They liked me, and I liked them. A couple of weeks later, when the new chart came out, my name was on it. It was still way down the bottom, but at least it was something. I still don't know who was responsible for doing that, or if it was a mistake. Either way, it made me happy. At least it was an acknowledgment that I was part of the team.

I think being friendly with the people who worked with the team, not just “on” the team, paid off in a lot of ways. As I entered that second year, I noticed that my laundry bag was never left behind. I had clean shorts for every day's practice. I wasn't forgotten, and that's a good feeling.

Because they invited me back early for fall practice, I wasn't treated as “just a walk-on” anymore, even though I was still only a member of the scout team. They gave me a locker in the varsity locker room . . . with my name on it. That was huge!

Oddly enough, my name was showing up in lots of other places too. For some reason, the story of my journey through Holy Cross and Notre Dame caught on as a human-interest story around campus. A reporter put together a big article on me that was printed in the basketball brochures they handed out with tickets at the ACC. It talked about my journey through the navy and Holy Cross, to playing on the scout team and coming very close to winning the title in the Bengal Bouts the previous spring. I guess I was such a fixture around the ACC that I seemed like someone worthy of profiling in the press, because
The Observer
did a similar article profiling my Notre Dame experience in its pages later that fall. There was one difference with that
Observer
piece, though: In that piece, they quoted me talking about my ultimate dream—to suit up for a Notre Dame home game, to come running out of that tunnel with my parents watching in the stands, to go down in the history books, and to prove to everyone back in Joliet that I did it. I really did it.

The newspaper played me up as the ultimate underdog, and boy, does Notre Dame love an underdog. They put me as an odds-on favorite to win the Bengal Bouts the following semester, but that was a long way off. All I cared about that fall was football. It would be my last season. I couldn't believe how fast time had flown. I only had three months of football season to have any shot at dressing, and as we got into October, it wasn't looking good.

The first two home games were against Northwestern and Michigan State, back-to-back Saturdays at the end of September and the first week of October. The dress lists post on Thursdays before each game. I walked down to the bulletin board outside of the locker room on both of those Thursdays, scanned the list, saw my name wasn't on it, and walked away. I didn't say anything about it. I didn't make a fuss about it. After all, other than Coach Parseghian, my family, D-Bob, and Freddy, no one had known I had this crazy dream of dressing for a game and actually playing until that newspaper article came out. Now everyone knew! Still, I didn't want to appear to be making a big deal of it. There were plenty of other guys on that team who would never get a chance to suit up. I'd kick myself sometimes for even dreaming about it.
What makes me so special?
I'd think.
Get over it
.

It's tough, though, when you a have a big dream like that and someone in a position of power, like Parseghian, tells you that it's possible, and then you go and tell other people who mean so much to you; it's tough to think it's not going to come true.

The best way to deal with that frustration was out on the field. I played harder than I ever had in my life that fall season. I went at every play like it was my last, like I was knee deep in the biggest, most important game of my life. In a way, that wasn't inaccurate. This was, once and for all, the last season of football I would ever play.

Coach Devine noticed. There were a couple of times during practice when he gathered everyone around for a pep talk and brought up my name. “I wish you guys had more heart, like Rudy. I wish you'd throw yourselves into these practices 100 percent. Then maybe you'd see the results we all want to see on game day!”

That embarrassed me. I was just doing my job.
Why would anyone want to play for Notre Dame and not work as hard as they could to be the best they could?
The whole thing didn't make sense to me. I was part of the team; I wanted the team to be great. Therefore,
I
had to be great! I had to play my hardest. What else was there to do?

I remember listening to the next couple of away games on the radio— games that would go down in Notre Dame history. The first was against North Carolina on October 11. We were losing 14–0 at the end of the third quarter. My guys just hadn't been able to move the ball. Our quarterback was struggling, plain and simple. It was painful to listen to it! He finally found his footing and caught a break, which brought us to 14–6 with about six minutes to go. That's when Coach Devine replaced him with a freshman hot-shot who no one in the football world had heard of at that point: a guy named Joe Montana. Over the course of the next five minutes, the team came to life. Montana nailed a couple of good passes, scored a touchdown, and made a two-point conversion to tie it up; and then Ted Burgmeier snagged what should have been a simple short pass and turned it into an eighty-yard touchdown to win the game 14–21. The whole campus erupted! You could hear cheers from every window, echoing across the chilly lawns under that October sky. It was awesome. A week later, Joe Montana led the team to another legendary fourth-quarter comeback against Air Force, only this time Notre Dame was down twenty-one points at the end of the third quarter. We managed to rally back to a 30–31 win.

While the fans erupted and the student body erupted and everyone was patting Joe Montana on the back, I knew better than to think that Dan Devine or Joe Yonto or Merv Johnson would consider that kind of a last-minute comeback any sort of a cheer-worthy victory for our team. If we were playing right, if we were playing as a unit, we never would have fallen that far behind.

When the team got back from that Air Force game, I was waiting for them. I knew when they were scheduled to arrive, and I was always there to greet them. But the first thing Coach Devine and Coach Johnson did that day was take the whole traveling team over to the big stadium to run sprints, a punishing workout in return for their near defeat. I could have just gone back to my room at that point, but something in my gut told me I needed to go run with them. We were all in this together. So I grabbed my uniform and suited up.

“Where you going?” Coach Johnson said. “You're not part of the traveling team.”

I remember saying something about feeling responsible. The fact that the offensive line wasn't doing its job the way it should was, in some way, my fault. I was their human tackle dummy. I was the guy tasked with working them harder than anyone else so they could prep for those big games! So I went and ran those sprints right along with them.

Even in that chilly October air, the sweat poured off me. I was exhausted. Heck, my legs are half the length of some of those guys', which means I run two strides for their every one! It hurt!

When Coach Johnson blew his whistle and finally called it a day, he came up to me, all pumped up, and yelled loud enough for every other guy to hear: “You're a real man, Rudy. Takes a real man to do what you just did.”

I didn't know how to react to that. I knew he meant it as a compliment, but something felt a little off. I wished he had told the rest of the guys who had gone back to the locker room that we
all
had to run sprints.
We're all in it together. We're all one team
. To me, that compliment solidified that feeling of division that permeated the team at that point—one that permeates a lot of great teams. What I did shouldn't have been considered anything special. It should have been what every member of that team wanted to do!

Unfortunately, I think those words from Coach Johnson ticked off a few of the first-team players. They had already heard Dan Devine use me in his “heart” example a couple of times that season, and the whole thing didn't go over so well with some of the full-scholarship players and All-American types who were far more talented and athletically gifted than I was.

That sense of division really came to a head one practice in late October, between the Southern California and Navy games—two of the final three home games of the season. USC kicked our butts, right there on our home field. The final score was 17–24. Morale was low. Tensions were running high. Practices were running long. It was the end of a particularly brutal day, probably the last play or two of the entire practice, and when the whistle blew I shot right through the tired and worn-out offensive line with everything I had and tackled one of our top players. He popped up madder than a hornet, and for days and days he wouldn't let it go. He kept complaining that I was pushing too hard, kept complaining that the practices were too long, kept complaining about everything.

We played Navy that Saturday, and won, which boosted morale as we headed into a week full of practices before our final home game of the season. Yet still, even on that Monday, that one particular player kept complaining about everything. The guy was a fifth-year senior. He was supposed to be a starter but wasn't, so he had a big chip on his shoulder.