Rudy (26 page)

Having been in the boxing ring myself, I swear that I could feel every punch, every swing, every broken nose and bruised rib those guys took during the fight at the end of that movie. The music had me up on the edge of my seat. The power of that whole story grabbed me and set my heart racing like I was right in that ring myself. And when Rocky did it, when he made it, when that final bell rang and he knew he had made it through all fifteen rounds—that he had accomplished the impossible, the thing no one said could be done—I cheered out loud! I had never done that in a movie theater. I had tears in my eyes. I could hardly believe the way my emotions poured out of me. Over a movie!

I walked out into the frigid air of a wintery South Bend night, my breath gathering in clouds all around my face as I strolled back to my little off-campus apartment, thinking,
Man, I want to make a movie like that! I want to make a movie like that about
my
story! How cool would that be?

It wasn't much more than a thought at that moment. A ridiculous fantasy. I knew nothing about Hollywood or movie-making whatsoever. All I knew was that film had created a feeling in me like something I had never felt before. All I knew was that whenever I told my story of my twenty-seven seconds of glory on that Notre Dame football field, people reacted. They were blown away. All I knew, way deep down inside, is that seeing
Rocky
had somehow changed my life. Maybe I wouldn't make a movie. I wasn't delusional. But there was something about the message of that movie, the inspiration it planted in my heart that would serve me going forward. I knew it. I just knew it.

The spring semester began and I sat in the stands watching other people, younger people, take to the ring at the Bengal Bouts; spring football got underway, and I found myself out on those same fields, coaching a bunch of kids and participating in the recruiting process as it went into full swing for the following year. But I simply felt lost. I felt like I was sitting in the stands at high school football games, reliving old glories, Friday nights under the lights. It felt exactly the same as it did back in those post–high school years. I didn't want to be there anymore, but I also had no idea what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go, or how the heck I was going to get there.

With all of that confusion, I felt like I needed a coach for my life that was as good as the coaches I'd had in football.
I need my very own Mickey! Like Rocky!
I thought.

Well, guess what? My wish was about to come true. And the Mickey would be someone I had known and admired for years.

Ara Parseghian had stayed right there in South Bend after he left the job as head coach, and he always seemed to be around campus. He was moving on with his life in many ways, transitioning from coaching to becoming a commentator for ABC Sports. He'd always say “hi” when he saw me, and we'd wind up talking about whatever was going on with the team. He seemed interested in what I was up to, and I was very interested to hear what he was up to. I was fascinated that a guy could move from one unbelievably successful career into another the way he was later in life. It developed into a friendship of sorts, which my old self couldn't really have imagined. He seemed like such a god from afar. Then almost like a father-figure type once he was my coach. Now? He was just a good guy who I was always happy to run into. I guess people are people, no matter how great or talented they are. The fact that I find myself talking to everyone, no matter what their position is in life, has proven that to me over and over again. There's no reason to hesitate to talk to anyone in life. At heart, we're all just people. You know?

Toward the end of that post-graduate year, I got into a real serious talk with Parseghian about my future. “I don't want to coach,” I told him. “I don't know what I want to do.”

“You should go sell insurance,” he said to me. “You'd be great at it.”

“I don't know anything about insurance. Where would I go sell insurance?” I asked.

“Go see Pat Ryan. Pat Ryan & Associates up in Chicago. I coached him at Northwestern.”

Given my lack of direction, I figured the best thing I could possibly do with my life at that moment was to follow Coach's advice. So I did. Turns out Pat Ryan was one of the richest guys in the world, and his insurance agency was a huge, successful organization. One call from Parseghian got me in the door, and I wound up getting interviewed at 9:00 a.m. a few days later.

The long and short of that meeting was pretty simple: “You're not qualified,” the interviewer told me.

“Well, what do I need to do to get qualified?” I asked.

“You need to be around the business more.”

“Is that all? Okay, then. I got it,” I said. If he wanted me to be around the business, I figured I'd stay right there and be around the business as much as I could. Starting that very moment.

I left his office and took a seat in the lounge. Stayed right there. All day. Never moved.

Around six o'clock, that interviewer came out of his office headed for home. He spotted me sitting there. “Hey,” he said, “didn't I interview you this morning?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Ruettiger, right? What are you still doing here?”

“You said stick around until you get the experience, so that's what I'm doing.”

He kind of chuckled to himself. “Alright, Mr. Ruettiger. You come and see me tomorrow. You're hired.”

Hey, the way I saw it, when Ara Parseghian tells you to go get a job, you go do it! I wasn't about to fail. If he didn't hire me that day, I would have kept coming back until he did. Call that hardheaded, but it's basically the same way I've accomplished all of my big accomplishments. Why change what's working, right? Perseverance is everything.

The insurance business wasn't easy. It required a lot of math and a pretty decent understanding of statistics, which of course I was no good at. It took me three or four tries to pass the test just to get my license. But I was great at sales meetings. The primary thing we were doing was selling insurance add-ons to car dealerships—extra insurance policies that the dealerships could sell to their car-buying clients to protect for all sorts of damages and circumstances not covered by regular car insurance. It was great for the dealers and great for us; it amounted to basically nothing but profit in the long run because so few of these policies ever resulted in real claims. Talking a good game came easy to me. My Notre Dame connections and my little tale of sacking the quarterback in the final home game my senior year was a hook for just about anyone I met who was into sports. People loved my story! And when they loved my story, they almost always wound up buying whatever it was I was selling. It was pretty cool.

It wasn't the most exciting or inspiring business to be in, of course. It was easy to get down. Easy to feel like I was just going through the motions. That's pretty true for anyone working at a big company, I suppose. But Pat Ryan & Associates was great about doing little things to keep employee morale up, including sending each of us to training seminars. They were basically coaching sessions aimed at firing us up. Like pep rallies. And man-oh-man, did they work! I remember this one speaker who got up in front of this room full of insurance salesmen in shirts and ties and just about tore the roof off. He just had this way of talking, almost like a great preacher or a coach, that got us thinking big, dreaming big, imagining how much money we could be making if we really applied ourselves, really got to work, really thought outside the box and went after every sale like it was the most important sale on earth. He made us feel good about our career choices. He made us feel like we should be grateful and happy to be helping people and helping ourselves while working for a big powerful company and contributing to a team that included the best of the best in the business, which meant that each and every one of us were among the best of the best! By the end of that guy's motivational speech, we were all on our feet cheering. We walked out of that boring beige hotel conference room like we were running out of the locker room into the Super Bowl. All just to sell insurance!

How the heck did that guy do that?
I wondered.
Man, I would love to be able to give talks like that someday!

I was so fired up, I started seeking out bigger, better assignments. I was single and willing to travel, so the company started sending me all over the country to tackle the biggest jobs out there. All the while, my bank account kept growing. I cleared over $40,000 in a single year! This was the late 1970s. It was almost unimaginable.

All my life I dreamed of having that kind of money. All my life I dreamed of not wearing hand-me-down clothes, or driving on bald tires, or skimping on the food I bought. It was wonderful. Having money at my fingertips certainly made things easier.

I was off working in Baltimore, at a dealership with all kinds of problems, when my job started to lose its fire. I don't know why. Maybe I needed another pep talk. Maybe I needed another seminar. Or maybe, just maybe, the fact that I was good at something and making good money at it wasn't enough for me.

Maybe
, I started to think,
this isn't my calling
.

By the time
Rocky II
hit in June 1979, I was ready to move beyond my insurance career. I was ready to move on, period. The inspiration of
Rocky
, the idea that it's possible to conquer your dreams, to drive your own fate, was amplified in that sequel, and I felt like it was time to find a sequel to all of that success I had unlocked at Notre Dame.

That's when I turned the fantasy of making a movie based on my life into a dream. A dream I could work toward. I started writing down ideas for scenes. I had no idea how to write a screenplay, no idea how to get a screenplay made, who to call, or who to give it to. Didn't matter. I started jotting these ideas down in a notebook. Started sketching out the way my story followed the arc of a movie. I thought back to that AP reporter, who said to me right after my teammates carried me off the field, “This only happens in Hollywood!” That guy had planted the seed in me right then and there! It felt like fate. It felt like destiny. It didn't feel like a fantasy— something that would never actually happen; it felt like a dream in the same way playing Notre Dame football had been a dream, a distantly attainable dream.

But I also had a more immediate dream: to quit the insurance business and go to work for myself. It almost didn't matter what business I went into. I just wanted to be my own boss. I was tired of answering to someone else all the time. I was tired of not knowing when and if I might get transferred to some other part of the country. I was fed up with the same old routines and fed up with being a salesman. It seemed like I spent 90 percent of my day getting turned down. “No! . . . No thanks . . . Let me think about it and call you tomorrow . . . Sorry, no.” Any great salesman will tell you it takes a ton of no's to get to one yes, but that process is tiring. Exhausting. I was ready for a change.

I remember watching the crew that came into the car dealership in Baltimore to buff the floors each night. I found out what kind of money those guys were getting paid, and it was pretty good. I had plenty of experience picking up soda pop and all kinds of sticky stuff at the Notre Dame stadium and helping around the ACC. It seemed like the kind of work I could get into without any training, and there were certainly lots of offices and businesses that needed cleaning crews. Selling businesses on hiring me would be a heck of a lot easier than selling insurance. And the work would be good. Manual labor. A start and a finish. Not these endless days of just getting to the next sale.

So I jumped in with both feet. I started picking up side jobs while continuing the insurance gig. I convinced a guy to let me live at his warehouse while I got my act together and bought the equipment I needed. I was scraping it all together and making things work however I could, just like I did back at Notre Dame. As weeks went by, more work started to come my way. I needed help and added a couple of guys to my crew. I actually enjoyed buffing floors, at least for a while. There was something meditative and pensive about it. Holding that machine, listening to that whir, my mind would wander—and it almost always wandered to my movie idea. I just couldn't let it go. I kept picturing my life from the outside, through a camera. I thought of splicing the pieces of my life together like splicing the practice films back at Notre Dame, putting the pieces in order so they all made sense. The people in my life started to come alive to me in a whole new way, like characters on a screen.

I made sure to do top-notch work everywhere I went, hoping that my good work would shine bright enough to attract the attention of other clients and garner strong word-of-mouth recommendations from the clients I had. It was tiring, juggling the two gigs. But it worked. A few months into it, I picked up a chance to take on a major client—a client that would require me to hire a real crew; buy bigger, better equipment; and really turn this thing into a full-fledged cleaning business with me at the helm. The income it would produce would allow me to quit the insurance business for good. There was just one problem: in order to get started, I'd need a chunk of cash up front.