Rudy: My Story

by Rudy Ruettiger

  I just about dropped the phone. I could hardly believe it. Here I’d been messing around going back and forth from Scranton to Hollywood getting involved with the wrong people for years, and this guy right here in South Bend had a connection to the team behind Hoosiers? Are you kidding me? It blew my mind!

  “I’d love to meet him!” I said.

  The meeting happened, and before I knew it, I was back on a plane to California, trekking out to Santa Monica to meet Angelo Pizzo— the Hoosiers’ screenwriter—at a little Italian restaurant. I sat at Louise’s Trattoria on the corner of 10th and Montana and waited. And waited. And waited. I sat there for three hours! I had been stood up.

  I couldn’t believe it. Was this one more dead end? I walked outside to get some air. That’s when I saw this older mailman walking by with the biggest, friendliest smile on his face. L.A.’s not necessarily full of the most genuinely friendly people in the world. I don’t think that’s any secret. So seeing this big, friendly smile surprised me. And to tell you the truth, he reminded me a lot of Rudy, the old janitor at the ACC. “Look at that smile!” I said to him as he passed by. He kind of laughed and looked at me, and I guess he could tell right away that I wasn’t the usual L.A. type either. “Where you from?” he said. I told him, and he told me he was from Michigan. Two midwesterners, crossing paths in La-La Land. “What are you here for?” he asked, and I told him the whole story—of how excited I was about this big meeting with Angelo Pizzo, the writer of Hoosiers, and how he told me to meet him at this place right here in his neighborhood and how he hadn’t shown up. Well, you’ll never guess what happened next. Even though he could have gotten in a lot of trouble, that mailman saw how genuine I was, and how passionate I was, and he walked me down around the corner and led me right to Pizzo’s front door.

  Angelo was surprised to see me. “How did you find me?” he asked.

  “Never mind that,” I said. “You’re late for lunch.”

  He had forgotten. He had been up all night writing. “Look,” he said. “No offense. I know that you probably got excited about coming out here to talk to me, but I’m not going to write another sports movie. Ever. And on top of that, I hate Notre Dame!”

  I was taken aback. But I also hadn’t come all this way to be turned away so quickly. If you haven’t noticed, I don’t take no very easily.

  “Well,” I said, “you could come to lunch at least.”

  He paused for a moment, looked in my eyes, and said, “Yeah, I’ll go to lunch.”

  Back at the restaurant, I avoided talking about the movie. We just shot the breeze and talked about our backgrounds. I learned a lot about Angelo that day—his family background, how his parents wanted him to become a doctor but he was sort of the rebellious one, swimming against the stream and trying to find his own way in the world against a whole slew of obstacles. The fact that he had come to Hollywood and found his own way to success was inspiring to me. I could see that there was a fire in him. A confidence. He hadn’t let anyone tell him no. That aspect of his personality reminded me of me! I kept thinking to myself, He’s the perfect guy to write this story!

  I shared just enough about my journey and he already knew enough about my journey to know it was a good story. But he didn’t give me any kind of affirmative answer before I left town. He basically left me with the same impression that he gave me right off the bat: that he didn’t want to write another sports movie, ever; and that he really, really despised Notre Dame.

  I flew back to South Bend with a broken heart. My hopes were so high on the way out there. It seemed like fate, having that introduction out of the blue. How could he not want to write this movie? He could have another Hoosiers on his hands. Who wouldn’t want to strike lightning twice like that? I wondered.

  It was early December, and leaving sunny Santa Monica behind for the gray-skied chill of South Bend certainly didn’t warm me up any. It felt like my chances had gone cold. My whole attitude fell cold. When you come so close and then take a blow like that, it’s hard to recover. It’s certainly hard to keep up that positive attitude everyone around me had gotten used to. I remember talking to myself on the way into the car dealership that Monday, reminding myself that the dream wasn’t dead, that so many people believed in my movie, that I had to do everything I could to get my positivity back—and most of all that I needed to set those bad feelings aside and really give everything I had to selling cars. I was good at that, I thought: focusing on what had to be done in the moment. I felt focused as I hung up my coat and sat down behind my desk, ready to tackle the day.

  No sooner did I plant my behind in that chair than my phone rang. It was the owner. He wanted to see me in his office. He had never really called me into his office that way before. My stomach dropped. It felt like I was being called into the principal’s office at school for some reason— and I honestly had no idea what that reason might be.

  “Rudy,” he said, “I’m sorry, but I’m gonna have to let you go.”

  “What?!”

  “Your focus is not on my business. Your focus is on making this movie. You’re talking about it, thinking of it. I don’t need half of you here. I need all of you.”

  I knew he was right. I wasn’t passionate about being in car sales, just like I wasn’t passionate about selling insurance. I just couldn’t believe his timing.

  “It’s December. It’s almost Christmas,” I said.

  Right here’s where he taught me a lesson. “Life is tough, isn’t it, Rudy?” he said.

  “But I don’t have any money saved. I’ve been spending my money! What am I supposed to do?”

  “Rudy, life is hard,” he said. “But I have a feeling you’re gonna get that movie made. I think I’d just be hurting you by keeping you here. You need to give it your all, be 100 percent committed. So you go do that. You go get that movie made.”

  I was really ticked off. In a way, I was more ticked off at myself for knowing he was right! After the whole experience with Frank Capra Jr., what was the lesson? I was the one who had to get this movie made. So why wasn’t I 100 percent committed to that pursuit? Why was I trying to juggle it around a career in the car business? Well, the same reason everyone does what they do, I suppose. We all have needs. We need to make money. We need to live day-to-day. I dunno. I felt so lost and confused at that moment, I had no idea what to think. Had I made all the wrong choices? Was I a fool? Was that feeling in my gut just plain wrong? I questioned everything. My past. My present. My whole mind-set. I questioned my faith. Everything.

  My first concern was how in the heck I was gonna make my mortgage payment the next month, so I went to the condominium association and asked if I could take over maintenance at our development. I told them all about my experience at Notre Dame, and thankfully they went for it. So that became my job: shoveling snow, being the fix-it guy, and when the spring of the brand-new decade—the 1990s—came around, I was the guy out mowing the grass to earn my keep. It’s like I was right back in my freshman year at St. Joe Hall at Holy Cross—only my dream of making a movie about my life felt even further away than my dreams of playing Notre Dame football ever did.

  Lou Holtz’s son lived in the same condo development. I gave him a copy of the script one day to share with his dad. He said he would, and then I never really heard anything more about it. Except for occasional conversations with D-Bob and Paul, I pretty much stopped talking about the movie. Once again, that dream fell dormant. It wasn’t dead. Something inside me would never let it die. It just sat there. Frozen. Again. While I spent my days mowing lawns.

  15

  One Hurdle at a Time

  “Rudy, do you have a lawyer?”

  Nearly an entire year had passed since I’d seen Angelo Pizzo in Santa Monica. I had called him and bugged him about my story a few times, but he just never seemed all that interested. Now here he was on the phone, calling me, and those were the first words out of his mouth. Great, I thought. What, is he gonna sue me?

  “Why?�
� I asked.

  “Because we just sold your movie to Columbia. We’ve gotta write a script. Fast. We need to get going.”

  “What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

  He explained the whole thing to me. A producer by the name of Rob Fried (pronounced “freed”), who worked at Orion pictures back when Hoosiers was made, had a new job at Columbia TriStar. One day over lunch, he asked Angelo and David Anspaugh if they had any sports movie ideas. Turns out Columbia Pictures had set aside a small budget, maybe $20 million or so, for a little sports film, and he had come to Angelo and David to see if he might be able to strike lightning twice.

  At first Angelo said no. But after lunch, David said, “You should tell him about that kid from Notre Dame!” And they called Fried back, together.

  Apparently Fried’s ears perked up. “What kid from Notre Dame?”

  They told him my whole story, and Rob Fried loved it. For some reason, the way they told it, Rob got real emotional and said he’d have a deal in place the very next day. And he did. But then there were some shakeups at Columbia and the film got shelved—one more hurdle.

  All of this stuff happened without me knowing anything about it!

  While I kept mowing lawns and shoveling walkways and making ends meet in South Bend. Life is strange that way sometimes, isn’t it? How all this stuff that could affect your life is happening and you don’t even see it. It’s wild to think about.

  Anyway, some time went by, and Rob Fried took the Rudy idea over to Columbia’s sister company, TriStar, which was run by a guy named Marc Platt—and they fell in love with the project and wanted to jump on it right away. Another producer named Cary Woods got involved, and he was just a super guy too. But Rob was the guy who really made it happen. He believed in the story so much, he just kept pushing forward with the project. He wouldn’t let it go, despite some of the obstacles that popped up. I guess, in some ways, that makes him a real Rudy in his own right, right?

  When Angelo called me, he needed all the rights and clearances from me to get started, which is why I needed a lawyer.

  Given everything I had been through with this movie idea, I still had doubts about whether this whole thing was real. It seemed too good to be true. I needed to do some digging, and I quickly found a way to get some digging done for me.

  One thing led to another and I eventually got in touch with a Hollywood entertainment attorney who had connections with Columbia Pictures. When I first called him looking for representation, he said he couldn’t take me on unless I paid him a retainer. “Look,” I said, “I don’t have any money to pay you, but I’ve been told that there’s a deal in place at TriStar. Check it out. If the deal is there, if it’s real, I’ll cut you in for a percentage. If the deal isn’t there, if it’s not real, then I don’t need you anyway.”

  He decided to dig. A few hours later, he called me back. “Rudy, there’s a deal. This is for real. Here’s what we’ve got to do . . .”

  We were off and running.

  As we rolled into 1991, Angelo Pizzo flew out to see me. He met D-Bob and all of the various characters in my life. We spent hours and hours just walking around the Notre Dame campus. He listened to me tell my story. He didn’t roll tape, or take notes. He just listened intently to everything I had to say, knowing the big moments and the reality of it all would settle into place in his mind and be there when he needed to write. It was cool just to watch him think. You could see him putting scenes together in his mind. I had spent so much time thinking about this movie, I could speak it in scenes! What I still didn’t understand was how on earth you could tell my whole tale, and get to the essence and power and meaning of everything that had happened in my life, in less than two hours of screen time.

  Angelo said I just needed to trust him. And after spending all that time with him, I did. I trusted him implicitly. I felt like he got me. He got what I was all about. He got what the message of my story was all about. He related to my story, personally, and I got the sense that he would infuse some of himself into the screenplay—as all great writers do.

  Then he went away. It was six months later when he sent me a copy of the script. I sat down and read it instantly, without stopping.

  I cried.

  It was beautiful. It captured the essence of who I was. It captured the flavor of everything I had done, but reduced it to these beautiful moments that made it all so clear. I had questions, of course—like, why didn’t he include my entering the Bengal Bouts? “Too many victories,” he explained. In a film, if there were too many victories, it would water down the story and take away some of the impact. That made sense too, and I suddenly understood that I had needed each of those victories in my real life to propel me forward. But the film version of my life had to be more to the point. More of an allegory. More picturesque in some ways. Like a poem with just the right words, just the right scenes to get the point and the meaning and the feeling across, and nothing more.

  He had made my dad a little less supportive than he was in real life, but that was just to make the tension clear, and to make it relatable to so many people who struggle to break free of the confines of their parents’ worldviews. That was exactly the struggle I had been through; he just filtered it through the eyes of a screenwriter.

  I was worried that he made Dan Devine out to be more of an obstacle to my success than the real champion of Rudy that he was, and Angelo explained that it simply had to be done to drive the point home, succinctly, about just how uphill and impossible my climb toward dressing for the final game had been. It all made sense! (He also promised to talk to Dan Devine about it before filming began, and he did. Dan wasn’t real happy about it, but he understood it was a movie and there had to be some dramatic license taken. He was such a supporter of me that he didn’t put up a stink.)

  There were several instances where he combined multiple characters into one, all to save time on screen and to drive home the messages and lessons I had learned from various folks along the way, from Siskel and the priests at Holy Cross and Notre Dame, from Freddy, from D-Bob, from Rudy the janitor. He made it all make beautiful sense and drove home the essence of everything I had been through, and everything my life had come to represent in the eyes of those who knew and were inspired by my story.

  Angelo was a genius.

  He was the right guy for the job. My initial instincts on that first flight out to Santa Monica were right. The funny thing is, he just didn’t know it himself. He needed convincing. He needed time. Both my dream and his ability to capture that dream needed time in order to emerge from their dormant states in the frost. It all made sense to me now. I could see the path that God laid out for all of us on this project. It was there all along. Life happens in God’s time—not ours, no matter how hard we push.

  The studio was just as impressed with the script as I was. They green-lit the project (that’s Hollywood speak for actually funding it and putting it on the schedule) immediately. They started talking about casting and peppering me with questions; they wanted me intimately involved from the get-go, to make sure everything was accurate and to utilize all the pre-planning and dreaming I had already done to help get the film up and running as quickly as possible.

  By June 1992, they were ready to rock and roll. I got a conference call from Angelo, David, and Rob Fried. “Alright, Rudy. We’re ready to go. We want to shoot in the fall, September if we can do it. October at the latest, before there’s snow on the ground. We do need to have the approvals in writing to shoot on campus, though. Who is it you’ve spoken to about that?”

  Uh-oh. In all this time, no one—including Angelo—had ever asked me about getting Notre Dame’s permission to shoot the film. And I never thought to bring it up. They all assumed, like almost anyone would, that the school would be thrilled to have this kind of attention . . . until I explained it to them.

  “You don’t have permission?” they said.

  I gave them the whole story, about the University Relationship department a
nd how they hadn’t let anyone film since the Knute Rockne days fifty years ago, and how they had rejected me. They were really upset, as you can imagine. They went back to the studio, and the studio head was absolutely irate.

  “Rudy, they’ve given us forty-eight hours. If we don’t get approval,” they said, “they’re going to drop the project.”

  That call came on a Thursday. I told them to come to Notre Dame that weekend. I’d get us a meeting. I was making it up. I had no idea how to get us a meeting. I had already been rejected. I was flying by the seat of my pants. At that point, I had everything to gain and nothing to lose. Suddenly, with my dream on the line, there were five seconds on the clock and I felt like the only player on the field.

  I walked out of my condo not knowing what to do. I happened to see Lou Holtz’s son across the parking lot. “Hey, did you ever give your dad that movie script?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” he said. “He loved it!”

  Lou Holtz loved the script. And that was an early version of my story—nothing like the powerful, passionate, inspirational script that Angelo had turned out. If Lou Holtz loved my story, why shouldn’t Notre Dame get behind it?

  That inspired me.

  I decided I couldn’t go back to University Relations. The rejection there had been too final, too complete. I needed to talk to Rev. William Beauchamp, the university’s executive vice president, who oversaw Notre Dame’s entire athletic program—not just the administration, but also the philosophy of it all. He had joined the university in 1987, had come to the priesthood later in life, and just seemed to me, from afar, like the type of man who might look at this whole thing with fresh eyes.

  I xeroxed three copies of Angelo’s script. I put on a suit and tie. I walked over and climbed the steps under the Golden Dome and headed straight into his office. I could see him at his desk. He wasn’t on the phone. There was no one with him. It seemed as if my timing was perfect.