Rudy by Rudy Ruettiger

life—with its bills, its expectations, its routines, and its too-easy-to-be-trapped-in patterns—seemed to get the best of me.
    I managed to stay in shape, just as I had in the navy, by running and lifting weights. My younger brother Francis had set up quite a little gym in my parents’ garage, and it served me well.
    When I’d run, I’d run all the way to Providence High on the other side of town to work out on their fields, and when I caught wind that they had finally started a football program, I volunteered and started coaching. I loved the game as much as ever, and coaching seemed to be the only way for a twentysomething guy to stay involved. I was a terrible coach. I yelled at the kids and did all the things I would eventually realize a coach really shouldn’t do. But I had fun with it. And I pushed those kids to get faster and stronger and to play their hardest, not just at the games but at every single practice. “Give it your all! Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork!” All that stuff that was reinforced in my gut by the navy.
    I was still dreaming. Dreaming big. Dreaming of Notre Dame. Especially when I’d run, when I’d work out, when I’d be alone with just my thoughts. I even had the confidence to tell other people about it. At work, someone would be talking about the game, and I’d say, “I’m gonna go to Notre Dame someday.” Guys would laugh. Chuckle. Give a little sneer, like I didn’t know what I was talking about. Occasionally they’d give me some grief about it, and there were a couple of times when that old pent-up anger got the best of me and I’d wind up in a fistfight coming out of the elevator.
    I’d bring it up at home, to my dad, and he’d say the most practical things he knew to say: “Well, how’re you gonna get in if you don’t have the grades for it, Danny?” or “How you gonna pay for that? It’s a lot of rich kids go to Notre Dame.”
    It’s hard not to let that kind of stuff get you down.
    But then there were a couple of guys who reacted very differently to my Notre Dame dreams. A couple of buddies from work. Older guys. Guys I decided to pay attention to, for some reason, more than I ever paid attention to the naysayers.
    The first was George. George was a drunk. He admitted he was a drunk. He knew he had basically given up on life, given up on any dreams he might have had when he was younger, and resigned himself to the fact that he’d work at the plant until they forced him to retire, drowning any sorrows in cans of beer in the meantime. What was amazing to me is that he seemed totally at peace with that decision. One of the ways he made peace with himself, I think, was to stay connected to dreamers like me. I’d meet George at a bar after work, or sometimes stop by his house for dinner, and he’d pepper me with questions about my travels in the navy. He was an ex-navy man himself, and we swapped a lot of navy stories whenever we hung out together. He also asked me to imagine and describe what I thought life would be like at Notre Dame once I got there.
    He liked to dream right along with me, and that inspired me.
    Then there was Siskel. Siskel was a stocky guy, like me, but in his fifties. Real quiet kind of guy. He was very good at his job, which I admired. And he saw that I was having a hard time with some of the other guys. So one day at lunch we struck up a conversation. I could tell he was really listening to me, not dismissing my ideas as crazy or naive. The very first time we really talked about it, he told me, “You go do your dream, Rudy. You’re young enough, you got nothing to regret.” The more we talked, the more I put the pieces of his own story together. He had been at the power plant for more than thirty years. Thirty! The thing was, he had a dream once just like me. He wanted to go to school. He wanted to become a doctor. But instead, he married