You remember Daniel Ruettiger — aka "Rudy?" — don't you? He was the subject of the movie by the same name that told the story of the undersized, under-talented kid who made the Notre Dame football team and became the poster boy for underdogs.
Well, this is the sequel.
What happened to Rudy where the story ends in the movie?
Let's put it this way: Remember the persistence and dogged determination he used to get into Notre Dame and onto the football team? That was a cakewalk compared to what he did to get his story made into a movie.
Rudy is — are you sitting down? — 63 years old now, 18 years down the road since the movie was released. He is a business enterprise. He has given an average of 75 speeches a year for nearly two decades, and, by the way, he'll be speaking to a writers' conference in Logan on Saturday.
Only in America could a kid make one tackle and earn a living off it for the rest of his professional life, but of course it was not the tackle that brought him fame and fortune but what he did to get on the field in the first place — two years in the Navy, two years of working in a power plant, two years at Holy Cross while coping with the challenges of dyslexia and three rejections from Notre Dame, then another four years to get on the field. After all that, he played just two plays for the Fighting Irish.
"The focus of the movie was to show hope and inspiration," Rudy said last week. "I think America got it."
America got it, all right. "Rudy" is included on any list of top sports movies, even though it's not really about sports as much as it is about the human heart. Nearly two decades later, Rudy is still in demand. He has eight speeches scheduled at various places around the country this month alone and recently spoke on the same stage as President Barack Obama at an event in Minnesota. According to Rudy's assistant, Carol, he still receives thousands of letters a year.
"It still amazes me," says Carol. "Schools are still watching the movie. He'll get letters from whole classrooms. They watch the movie at the start of the year to motivate the kids."
The last time we saw Rudy in the movie, he was sacking the Georgia Tech quarterback. What the movie didn't show is what happened next. He worked for a car dealership for the next 10 years while trying to convince Hollywood that his life's story was movie material.
They could make a movie about Rudy trying to make a movie. Rudy, the slow, unathletic, 5-foot-6, 165-pound kid who dreamed of playing football for Notre Dame, dreamed with equal determination of turning that experience into a movie. Inspired by "Rocky," "Field of Dreams" and "Hoosiers," he peddled his movie idea for nearly a decade, but found no takers. He was working as general manager of a friend's car dealership in South Bend, Ind., while trying to sell his movie idea. Then one day his boss/friend told him: "I have to do something you won't like. I've got to fire you. … If you don't leave, you'll never do the movie."
Says Rudy, "He loved the story, but he knew if I stuck around working for him it would never happen."
He cut grass and shoveled snow to earn a living while he continued to peddle the movie. He was rejected repeatedly until finally someone else caught the vision. He met for three minutes with eventual producer Rob Fried, among others, at Sony Pictures.
As Rudy recalls, "After three minutes they said, 'We gotta do this.' It took me 10 years to play 27 seconds (of football) at Notre Dame. … It took me 10 years to get three minutes and a 'yes' to do the movie." He thinks again about his second great challenge of overcoming the odds. "Notre Dame was easy compared to selling the movie to Hollywood."
Rudy was involved in every aspect of the movie — wardrobe, writing, production, casting, editing. He watched the movie 26 times in the editing booth and cried every time. It became an instant classic, a Rockylike underdog story. Rudy, who went to the White House to watch the movie with President Clinton, Colin Powell and Joe Montana, has been riding the "Rudy" wave ever since. Besides the speeches, he has written four books and is working on a fifth.
"The story made a difference in people's lives," says Rudy. "That's why I'm going to Logan to speak to aspiring writers — they want to write and inspire people."
Looking back, Rudy sums up the movie's theme this way: "Hope and inspiration to go through the tough times, no matter what is thrown at you, as long as you have purpose. Sometimes you need a plan. Sometimes you just move toward your goal and the plan comes together. Sometimes it's just best to move forward."
Email: drob@desnews.com