Rudy: My Story

by Rudy Ruettiger

  I had no idea what I was going to do once I got there. I just knew I needed to find out what the connection was (if any) between Holy Cross and Notre Dame. I needed to figure out some way to get my foot in the door. Maybe no one would listen to me. Maybe no one would help me. Maybe the whole thing was stupid and I was about to make a gigantic fool out of myself.

  You know what? I didn’t care.

  Part II

  Blue & Gold

  5

  Holy Cross

  An amazing thing happens when you take a leap of faith. A stunning thing. I must’ve heard about it a hundred times in those old Catholic masses, but it never sunk in. I had to live it to understand it. I had to go through it to be able to look back on it and see how it all fell into place.

  What happens when you take that bold first step in the direction of your dreams without any knowledge or forethought or assurance about how it’s going to turn out, without any particular light to guide you other than that feeling in your gut, without the ability even to see whether that step is secure or safe or just a hole in the ground that you’re about to fall into—what happens is that the path to your destination suddenly appears before you, one stone at a time. The path might seem strange. It might take you in a different direction than the one you intended. But you’ll get to the destination that’s meant for you. All you’ve got to do is keep walking, and those stones keep appearing. The further you go, the further you’ll trust the process until you’re walking forward without even thinking about the unknowable path ahead. You’re just trusting, just going with it, confident that the path will be there.

  That’s faith. That’s belief. And that’s powerful.

  I pulled my car into the back parking lot behind this little beige-brick building at Holy Cross and stepped inside to find a simple tiled floor, a silver cross on the wall, sparse decorations, and a bulletin board full of notices. It felt like a school, but with something extra: a little fireplace set in a sunken area just a step down and to the right, with a few wooden chairs and couches with thick brown cushions. A gathering spot. Almost like a living room. There were a couple of students lounging there, reading books. It felt comfortable.

  A sign pointed me to the office, which was just a few steps to the left. A woman greeted me with a warm smile and asked if she could help me. She said it as if she meant it too—not like one of those gatekeeper secretaries you meet in some offices, whose only job is to keep you from getting to the important people in the back.

  I said my name was Rudy and that I was interested in learning a little bit about this school. She said “Brother John” would likely be able to help me, and she asked me to take a seat. Couldn’t have been a minute later when Brother John Driscoll stepped out, shook my hand with a big, warm smile, and asked me to come join him in his office.

  Brother John Driscoll was the head of the school; he was a little balding guy who chain-smoked cigarettes like they were going out of style. He was the man who founded Holy Cross in the mid-1960s. Somehow, just by walking through the door, I had reached the man at the top. It felt great!

  Within about ten seconds, he answered my biggest question: yes, Holy Cross is affiliated with Notre Dame. The Brothers of Holy Cross— the same Catholic order that founded Notre Dame University—ran the school. And yes, the Brothers would recommend that a certain number of students from Holy Cross transfer over to Notre Dame each year, if their grades were solid and they had shown the abilities and skills and passion it takes to make it. As a two-year community college, one of its primary goals was to take good students and make them great, to prepare them to move on to fine universities, Notre Dame included, he told me.

  That made me nervous. I knew for a fact that I wasn’t a “good” student. My record would show that. But I went ahead and told Brother John my whole backstory anyway: how I’d been blown away the first time I ever stepped foot on the Notre Dame campus, and how something about it felt just welcoming to me—almost like a home, if that makes sense. I told him about my time in the navy, and about Siskel and the terrible thing that happened just two days earlier, and why it was so important to me to come to Holy Cross and to fulfill my dream of going to Notre Dame.

  After listening to everything I had to say, Brother John explained that there were a few things he would need to see—transcripts, a recommendation or two—but that after all I’d said and the initiative I had shown by driving all the way to see him that day, he didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t enroll at Holy Cross for the fall semester. “We’d love to have you, Rudy.”

  I could hardly believe my ears. My old self wondered, Is this guy for real? I didn’t know that a place of higher education could be so welcoming.

  Until that moment, I don’t think I truly believed that that kind of grace and acceptance was real.

  I hopped back in my car and drove toward Joliet with my mind spinning. I left there not with a hope of applying, not with a thought that I might get rejected, but with what amounted to an all-out acceptance. “We’d love to have you.” All I had to do was complete the necessary steps. How to complete those steps was a mystery to me, but on that drive home the answers started to come. I knew where I could find someone to help.

  Of course, I didn’t tell my parents where I had been. Telling them wasn’t an option yet. I needed to take the next steps. I needed to make it real enough to make sense to them. Real enough that they wouldn’t bring up the doubts and fears that parents raise when trying to protect their kids from failure, including the big question of how I was going to pay for tuition. I hadn’t even asked Brother John how much the school cost! I didn’t care. I knew I’d figure out a way to pay for it. Somehow. I wasn’t going to let that stand in my way. I didn’t want anything to stand in my way. But how?

  I hoped that a man name Pat Sullivan would have some answers for me. I had met Pat at Providence High when I was coaching football. I knew that he served as a college counselor, among other things. I had a feeling he would know about this stuff—how to get my transcripts and what kind of recommendations I would need, and all of the things Brother John said were required of me. So as soon as I got the chance, I ran over to see him.

  Pat was just as warm and accepting of the whole idea of me going to Holy Cross as Brother John was. He saw my passion and excitement and didn’t seem to doubt for one second that I could not only get in but do well at that school. And he fully supported my dream of using Holy Cross as a stepping-stone to Notre Dame. He said he thought it was a smart thing to do—Me? Smart?—since the affiliation would give me a leg up that I might not have if I attended Joliet Community College, or any other good community college for that matter. He was thrilled that I had the courage to go for it, and he offered to do anything he could to help. He even hopped on the phone to Holy Cross right then and there, as I sat in his office, and spoke to Brother John about the requirements. All of a sudden, the ball was rolling.

  Pat was also the guy who revealed a major miracle to me: my tuition would be paid by the navy. I had never heard of the GI Bill when I enlisted. Or, if I had heard of it, I wasn’t paying attention and had no idea what it was all about. The reason I enlisted was to secure my fate, to save my life, as it were. But I had no idea that the navy was going to save my life in so many ways. The simple fact that I had served in the navy meant that they would pay my tuition under the GI Bill. They would even cover the heavy expense of Notre Dame tuition once I made the transfer from Holy Cross. (Assuming I could make it.)

  I felt like I had won the lottery. A lottery I didn’t even realize I had played.

  I went back to Holy Cross a few times that summer to drop off the various portions of my application and to figure out all the logistics. There were times when I’d pile a couple of my little brothers in the car just to have some company on the long drive, and I’d wind up leaving them sitting there with the windows cracked open for what seemed like hours while I sorted everything out. They still rib me about it to this day.

  The
provisions of the GI Bill didn’t cover room and board, and I got scared for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to afford a place to live while going to school full-time. But Brother John took my worry in stride and sent me over to see a man named Father Bayness. Father Bayness ran St. Joseph’s Hall, which everyone called St. Joe’s. It was a dormitory run by the Brothers of Holy Cross that housed a mixture of Holy Cross and Notre Dame students and seminarians, situated right on the Notre Dame campus. The place was a well-kept secret that I felt privileged to discover. Father Bayness asked if I would be willing to do some maintenance, mowing the lawn and keeping the place looking good, in order to earn my stay. “Mind? I would love to!” I told him.

  That was that. I had my tuition covered. I had a place to stay. All that was left was to tell my family and to finally, officially, quit my job at the power plant.

  As you can imagine, my parents were shocked. They asked the questions I anticipated they would ask: How could I get in with my grades, and how was I going to afford it? Boy, were they surprised when I had all the answers. Going into the navy was one thing, but to think that one of their kids was heading off to college—it was something they hadn’t dared to dream. I was the first one ever in my family to go to college. They were proud and happy and nervous and a little confused at the same time about how I managed to pull it all off.

  The guys at work were shocked too. Co-workers tried to shoot it down. “What’s Holy Cross? You’re not going to Notre Dame after all!” Just wait, buddy. Supervisors tried to keep me there. “Why do you want to leave? You have a bright future here, Rudy. You’re a good worker.” Because I’m going to Notre Dame! I didn’t argue with anyone. I didn’t want to get in a fight. I didn’t want to put any of those guys down, and I didn’t have any right to. This was my dream. My life. That’s all. So I said as little as possible and just got the heck out of there. I was ready to go. I had been preparing to go for all this time. Finally, my time had come.

  I had no space in my mind or my heart for anyone to tell me I was being ridiculous for going to school at an age when most of my peers would have already graduated. I had no room for anyone to tell me I couldn’t do it or wouldn’t make it. I had graduated boot camp. I had already been through the navy. I had been through the toughest part of life, in many ways, and had overcome obstacles greater than I ever thought I could. So this whole decision—it was nothing. Now that the ball was rolling, it didn’t feel like a huge challenge to me at all. There weren’t nearly as many obstacles as I thought there would be in order to get into Holy Cross, and those obstacles were easily surmountable. I knew this was what I wanted, and there was no reason I couldn’t have it. Why not me? You can’t take this from me. I know what I can do now. I know what I’m capable of. I’ve still got a long way to go, and I know I’ve got to earn my way through. I’ve got to get the grades and work hard and prove myself if I’m going to move from Holy Cross to Notre Dame. I understood all of that. And I would earn it. I just knew it.

  In fact, I knew even more than that. I was so set on getting into Notre Dame that I didn’t doubt it anymore. It was going to happen. I believed it with everything in my being. It’s as if I was willing that dream to happen. I believed it so much that I started to will a whole new dream to happen too.

  Every trip to Notre Dame’s beautiful campus that summer brought me back to 1966, to those first few moments of discovery during that senior retreat and that feeling that I belonged at Notre Dame. Sometimes I arrived early in the morning, before the Holy Cross office was even open, just so I could walk around that campus in the peace and quiet, letting it sink in that this was real. This was my new home.

  The more real it felt, the more often my mind wandered back to that moment at the stadium when my buddy and I wandered into the locker room with the football team. I thought about all those guys you never saw on TV, all those guys whose names I had never heard on the radio, all those third- and fourth-string guys who were shorter and stockier than those giant first- and second-team players who would go on to professional football careers. I thought about Coach Parseghian and that ridiculous line I blurted out to him about wanting to come play football for Notre Dame someday. Only now, it didn’t feel so ridiculous anymore. It felt like the truth. I did want to play for Notre Dame. I was going to Notre Dame. I was right here on campus. Coach Parseghian was the first coach in Notre Dame history to actually encourage walk-on players to try out for the team. There was no reason I couldn’t make it happen.

  Moving into St. Joe’s that fall felt almost as big as walking up the gangway of the USS North Hampton. This is my new home.

  St. Joe’s was an old-fashioned four-story, beige-brick dorm house filled with lots of little boarding rooms and a few communal bathrooms for maximum efficiency. It slept about 140 students on its top three floors. The main floor had a dining room, a communal area, and a chapel, which I quickly found to be a perfect, quiet place to study without being disturbed, where no one would come knocking on my door to chat or to try to convince me to go out carousing.

  I started out in room 224, without much of a view, but to me the view didn’t matter. I was here. I was on the Notre Dame campus! I could step out my door and walk right down to St. Joseph’s Lake, follow the winding path off to the right through the beautiful woods, which led me to everything I ever dreamed of: turn right and follow the path along St. Mary’s Lake, up past Fatima House to Holy Cross; or down around and off to the left where I’d wind up right in the spot where I first discovered the glowing candles of the Grotto on that senior retreat back in high school. It was my personal gateway to the Basilica and those beautiful lawns under the watchful eye of Mother Mary atop the Golden Dome. It was all right there.

  I could hear the bells from the Basilica without so much as stepping a foot outside.

  My room was so narrow I could almost reach my arms across from one wall to the other. My bed was like a military cot, with a metal frame and a mattress with no box spring sitting on top of a set of spring-like wires. There was a lamp on a little utilitarian wooden desk by the single window, a closet with room for a few hangers and a set of wobbly drawers. That’s it.

  Some kids might have a hard time adjusting to that. To me? It was much more than I ever had to myself growing up in a shared room with six brothers, and far more comfortable than my sardine-packed quarters in the belly of a navy destroyer escort. Heck, it had a door that I could close whenever I wanted. It even locked!

  To me, it was more than enough. I was grateful for every inch of it.

  The first person I met in that dorm was a student named Freddy. I was so excited to be there, I introduced myself about as boldly as a guy could: “My name’s Rudy. I’m gonna go to Notre Dame to play football. And I was in the navy!” He was a sophomore at Notre Dame, and it turned out that Freddy and I were both dreamers. He had his eyes set on the law, maybe becoming a judge someday, and he loved that I made such a bold statement as soon as I met him. We both had money issues, and we had both agreed to mow lawns and keep the place clean in order to pay for our room and board, which meant that we’d wind up spending a lot of time together. Thankfully we hit it off. In fact, the two of us became fast friends almost immediately, and Freddy would soon help me in ways I never imagined a fellow student ever could.

  My very first class at Holy Cross was math. I dreaded it. I was nervous. I had visions of repeating my high school experience all over again—visions of that fifth-grade humiliation in front of all of these smart college kids.

  It took about ten seconds for all of that fear to fly out the window. Our professor, a little Holy Cross Brother named Pedro, stood in front of the fifteen or so students in one of the school’s eight classrooms and said, “How many of you guys want to go to Notre Dame?” All of us raised our hands. Maybe one guy didn’t. Clearly I’d have my work cut out for me competing against all of these guys for a spot, I figured.

  “Good,” Brother Pedro said. “That’s good. You all know what you need to do to g
et to Notre Dame: you all took basic math in high school.”

  I spoke up. “I didn’t have any algebra. I wasn’t smart enough,” I said.

  “You’re smart enough,” he countered. “Here’s the deal. This course is parallel with the math they teach at Notre Dame, and it counts as the math credit. So if you pass this, you won’t have to take any more math at Notre Dame.”

  Wow. That sounded pretty good to me. I just hoped I could pass.

  “As of this moment, you’ve all got an A, so don’t worry about it,” he said.

  We all have an A? What did he mean by that?

  “Here’s what you need to do to keep that A: you need to follow the plan. The plan is: Show up every day. Do your homework. If you don’t know how to do it, ask your friend.”

  Did he just say all we need to do to get an A is to show up and do our homework? In a heartbeat he took the pressure off the grade, the grade being one of the big obstacles I dreaded. Do you know how exciting that was? I kept writing down everything he said. Ask your friend. You mean I can ask a friend for help if I don’t know the answer? In high school that was called cheating! This is awesome!

  It certainly seemed like a plan I could follow, unlike the plans they tried to lay out for us all in high school, where I (like everyone else) had been told that in order to become a “college-bound” student I would need to take trigonometry and all kinds of advanced math. Brother Pedro insisted that wasn’t true.

  Why didn’t anybody tell me this sooner?! If I hadn’t been so excited about it, I might have been angry. Why had I been told time and time again that there was only one way to get to college when here I was, in the middle of my first college class, hearing an entirely different truth? I wanted to run back and bust open the doors at my high school to tell everyone, as if it were some kind of secret I’d uncovered. Why on earth would anyone keep this a secret?