Rudy

by Rudy Ruettiger

  Even so, I still found myself struggling. A few weeks in, that old grade-school frustration kicked into overdrive. I wasn’t keeping up the way I wanted. I didn’t do well on my first assignments. I failed my first two quizzes in English and psychology. It wasn’t anywhere near the kind of work I needed to do to get into Notre Dame.

  Back at the dorm one night, I complained about it to Freddy. I remember saying to him, flat out, “I’m just not a smart guy.” He looked at me as if I were talking nonsense, and his immediate response was a generous one: “Let me help ya,” he said.

  Freddy was smart. That’s just the plain truth. He had dreams of becoming a judge someday, and it was clear to me that he had the brains and the drive to get there. The fact that he would open up and offer to share some of his knowledge with me was a gift.

  The first time he looked at my notebooks he said, “Geez, how come you take all these notes?” I was shocked. I thought everyone took notes that way. I told him I just take down every word the professor says, so I can go over it all once I’m back home. “Well, that’s your first problem,” Freddy said. “You’re so busy writing, you’re not listening. You gotta listen! You’re not listening if you’re taking all these notes.”

  No one had ever mentioned that before. I asked him how to do it right, and he just started teaching me. He made it seem simple.

  Another time I said to him, “How am I gonna pass Spanish?” Well, he was Spanish! He was happy to help me with that too. “This is all you need to know. Here’s how you pass your test.” He explained to me that most teachers try to teach you too much, and you need to pick through it and remember the most important stuff so you don’t get overwhelmed. Not only did I take too many notes, I studied too much, he said. Plain and simple. Studying everything made it too overwhelming. What I needed to do was learn how to study the right stuff. He even stepped in when I was tired to make sure I went to take a nap. “You’re not going to learn anything if you’re barely awake. Go to sleep, then come knock on my door and I’ll help you,” he’d say.

  Once I learned Freddy’s techniques, it started getting easier. My tests improved greatly. I wound up doing better on homework assignments.

  All they did in high school was let me know how stupid I was. Why didn’t anyone sit me down and show me a different way to study? Or how to study, period? Why didn’t anyone ever consider the fact that I might have a learning disorder?

  It was shocking to me when my Holy Cross English teacher, Mrs. Shane, first brought that news up. No one talked of dyslexia in those days, though that’s clearly what I was facing. She simply noticed that I had trouble concentrating, trouble absorbing whatever I was reading. She and Brother John worked together to get me tested—not as a way to single me out but as a way to help me. They let me know that there wasn’t a cure for these sorts of things and that there didn’t need to be. It just may take a little work to figure out how to help me learn better, they said, since I processed things a little differently than a lot of other kids. They made it all seem like a very normal, helpful process. They shared examples of some really famous people who had learning disorders, including Albert Einstein. It was shocking. Why hadn’t anybody told me? Why didn’t anybody try to help before now?

  In fact, there’s a great quote from Einstein that seems fitting to share here: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” For my whole life, I’m pretty sure I was that fish!

  When it came to reading, which was the biggest problem for me, Mrs. Shane tried to get me to slow down and read each line with purpose. I didn’t want to do it. It took forever. It drove me nuts to read slowly. Then one day, she suggested that I try listening to soft music while I read—classical music, ideally—just to calm my brain down a bit. Well guess what? It worked. Listening to a little peaceful music allowed me to understand what I was reading. It worked like magic. I have no idea where she got the insight to be able to suggest something like that. It was just clear to her that I had a learning disability, and rather than using that as an excuse to let me slide, or an excuse to give up on me, she did what she could to help me. Between Mrs. Shane, Brother John, and the major help I was getting from Freddy, I got a handle on it. I turned my study habits around. I turned my whole relationship with learning around.

  Before I knew it, my first semester at Holy Cross was over. I was surprised how quickly it flew by. College classes were more intense than high school courses, but they were also short-lived. I liked that you could see the end just a few months out and wouldn’t be stuck doing the same stuff for an entire year. It made sense to me. There was a goal you could see. A finish line. An end zone.

  I had never had so much as a B all through school, yet my first college-level report card was all Bs and a couple of As. It felt awesome. Those were the kind of grades I had always been told I needed in order to be “college bound.” Funny that I had to actually go to college before anyone would help me figure out how to get those grades in the first place.

  6

  Kneeling at the Grotto

  Despite my good grades, Brother John was very clear to me: the only way I could get to Notre Dame was to complete four semesters at Holy Cross. Applying early wouldn’t do me any good.

  I didn’t listen.

  Who could blame me? I was excited. My GPA was through the roof (by my own personal standards, at least). My study habits were improving; heck, I had study habits for the first time in my life. Walking across that campus every day, interacting with other students, getting out there at St. Joe’s just to mow the lawn and keep the place looking good, got me more and more excited about being a Notre Dame student. So with that very first report card in hand, I filled out my application to transfer and dropped it off in the admissions office in the Main Building, under the Golden Dome.

  The building itself is daunting. The massive granite staircase leading up to the entrance seems to put the whole place on a high pedestal. The doors are massive. The entry hall is massive, and the weight of the thick, dark-wood moldings gives the interior a sense of history. The hall is covered with magnificent old paintings of Christopher Columbus. Back in those days no one questioned the Columbus legacy or whether it was right or wrong that the Europeans came in and basically took the land from the Native Americans. When the paintings were done in the late 1880s, Columbus was seen as a saint: a Catholic Italian who risked everything, who did the impossible, who sailed across the vast ocean when everyone said it couldn’t be done and discovered America in the process. (Talk about a leap of faith!) Luigi Gregori, a Vatican portrait artist whom Notre Dame’s founders brought over to work some artistic magic in the Basilica, did the paintings. Gregori took on the Columbus murals after the original main building burned down in 1879. They were almost one hundred years old as I walked past them with my application in hand. I couldn’t help but feel like I was a part of that history, as daunting as it was. The feeling of elitism, of implied greatness, permeates the walls at Notre Dame. It’s the polar opposite of the warm embrace of Holy Cross. I could feel it in that building, and it still made me feel like I was a bit of an outsider. But not for long! I kept telling myself.

  I dropped the application in the appropriate slot. Then I waited. I checked my mailbox every day. I started living like I was a Notre Dame student. I put a Notre Dame stamp on my Holy Cross ID and ate in the South Dining Hall whenever I wanted, with its high, vaulted, church-like ceilings and large, wooden communal tables. I fed off the energy of all of those students. I wore a Notre Dame jacket and acted like a Notre Dame student in every way possible. I got involved with student government, attended student council meetings, helped influence and make decisions that would affect the Notre Dame student body. No one asked to see my ID. No one knew the difference! No harm, no foul, right?

  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 th
in. 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 brea
k 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.