Irish Don’t Get Rudy’s Message

This being USC-Notre Dame week, and the Trojans being favored by a pew’s worth of points, and the Irish in need of some tear-streaked inspiration, there’s only one person to call.

“Hey there, ya doin’ good?” the man asks, smothering your hand in the lobby of a Newport Beach hotel this week, graying and pudgy yet still refusing to take “no” for an answer.

Nearby, a bellman is wearing a pin symbolic of employee overachievement.

It’s called a “Rudy Award.”

The kid looks down at the pin, looks up at the man, shakes his head.

“That’s really him?” he says.

Could it be anybody else?

Short legs, huge smile, wide gait, Rudy Ruettiger looks exactly as one might expect, 29 years after being carried off the Notre Dame field as the unlikeliest of heroes, 11 years after that experience was turned into an enduring sports flick.

He still talks the way actor Sean Astin once plowed through all those South Bend obstacles -- sweating, relentless, won’t stop no matter how messy it looks.

“They have this new T-shirt out. It’s worn by fans from teams that play Notre Dame,” said Ruettiger, referring to a logo on the shirts that mocks his name. “At the Tennessee game, I ask a kid if I can pose for a photo with him wearing the shirt. He doesn’t know why, and I don’t tell him. When he finds out later, he about dies. It was awesome.”

He’s 55, and has any football player ever made more out of two snaps and a kickoff?

It took him a decade to make the movie, and he’ll spend the rest of his life living off it as boss of Rudy International, a motivational group involved in selling books and memorabilia and $20,000 speeches.

He speaks 60 times a year, traveling from his Las Vegas home to schools and churches and corporations and football fields and ...

Everywhere but the place where, this week, he is needed most.

Rudy has never spoken to the Notre Dame football team.

Turns out, you call Rudy for wisdom on USC-Notre Dame week, you’re calling the wrong guy.

To a younger generation of fans, he symbolizes the Fighting Irish, yet he has never been asked to address them.

Many players historically list his movie as one reason for wanting to come to Notre Dame, yet he has never met them.

When, on Saturday, USC plays host to an underdog Notre Dame team desperately in need of a Rudy injection, Rudy will be watching it on television.

“The football team tells me, they don’t need Rudy, they’ve got Knute Rockne and all those guys, and they’re right,” he says. “They don’t need Rudy. But they need the spirit of Rudy.”

He has been featured at Notre Dame pregame luncheons, appeared at pep rallies, signed autographs there for hours.

He’s embraced everywhere on campus, it seems, except in the one place where he might do the most good.

The word is, longtime Irish football folks find Ruettiger too much of a salesman, too self-centered, making too much out of nothing, too much Rudy.

The truth is, because of the movie, as many sports fans today have heard of Rudy as Rockne.

Any Notre Dame football team that doesn’t understand that is lost in those echoes.

“There’s no negative there from our standpoint,” says John Heisler, Notre Dame associate athletic director. “We know that for many people, their entire image of Notre Dame is that movie, it’s him. We welcome him back anytime.”

Heisler said it was a matter of scheduling, not snubbing.

“Rudy has his own life, his own business, he doesn’t live here anymore, it’s not that easy for him just to drop by,” Heisler said.

Ruettiger says he would drop everything.

“Wouldn’t that be great, to talk to the team, just once?” he says. “But that’s OK. It’s not a big deal. It’s not about me. It’s about the message.”

It’s a message that will breathe again Saturday at the Coliseum, a game that is the answer to a Rudy trivia question.

Anybody else notice the team that Notre Dame is playing on the ancient television set in the Ruettiger living room at the start of the movie?

It’s USC, of course, a connection that stretched to last season, when Ruettiger was signing autographs before the Trojan game in South Bend.

The last people in line were USC parents who said their football-playing son was a “Rudy.”

When Ruettiger found the player on the USC sidelines during the game -- “The janitors still let me in,” he said with a laugh -- he offered encouragement.

It’s appropriate, don’t you think?

Today, if a football dreamer left Joliet, Ill., in the middle of the night to travel to one ideal place where he would spend his next four years working for a chance to play one minute of traditional big-time football, the kid would probably take that bus to USC.

Today, wouldn’t Rudy be a Trojan?

“Notre Dame has stripped away that feeling,” said Ruettiger. “They’re no longer recruiting the passion. They’re no longer recruiting kids who would run through a wall for you. A ‘Rudy’ would have trouble there today.”

He was in Newport Beach this week speaking at a private dinner hosted by former high school teammate and mortgage banker Pat Ward.

The Notre Dame hero was raising money for the USC Catholic Center, and did you ever think you’d see those dozen words in the same sentence?

As usual, Ruettiger was funny, emotional, and spoke 45 minutes longer than expected

“Don’t let people tell you who you are or what you’re going to be!” he said to the room filled with USC folks.

Corny or self-centered or whatever, it was a message that the many Trojans in the room appreciated, a message the Irish might have appreciated even more.