Starting a new career in mid-life is a challenge many people face, even when they don’t want to. It’s never easy, either way. But I dare you to ask most people who started a whole new career path in their late thirties, early forties, maybe even their fifties if they’re happy about what they’ve accomplished. I bet you nine out of ten of them will say, “Yes! Absolutely. I’m so glad I did it. I wish I had done it sooner!”
Change is good. Life is all about change. The question to ponder is whether you embrace the changes and learn to grow both from and with the changes, or whether you let those changes scare you into retreat.
After the filming of Rudy ended toward the end of 1992, I knew I’d have less than a year to get my act together. Less than a year to prepare myself to take advantage of the opportunities that the film’s release would present to me. A movie is a once-in-a-lifetime thing for someone like me. If I didn’t take advantage of it in some way, I may never get another shot. I knew that.
So I started asking myself some really serious questions. Mainly, what did I want to do with my life? I knew I didn’t want to keep shoveling snow and mowing grass, that’s for sure. I had been down the coaching route early on, and I still had no interest in that. I knew I didn’t want to go back and sell insurance, and I didn’t want to get back into the car business either.
What did I really want to do? What got me fired up? What got me out of bed every morning? What was that feeling I had when we were making the film? What were the best, most productive times of my life? What could I focus on that would keep me happy (and hopefully well paid) for the rest of my life?
The thing I kept thinking back to was early in my insurance days, when I went to a seminar aimed at firing us up, and I saw that guy give a speech that brought all of us insurance salesmen to our feet. I kept thinking back to that feeling I had as I walked out of that room—that feeling of, “Man, I want to be able to do that for people some day!”
I thought long and hard about what that guy did. I thought long and hard about what the movie Rudy was going to do for people. And I knew, once and for all, what I wanted to do: I wanted to inspire people. I wanted to take the message of Rudy, the message of my life’s journey, and infuse that message wherever I could—to companies big and small, to the military (building on my navy background), to colleges, to high schools, to middle schools, maybe even to elementary schools.
I wanted to get up in front of audiences, big and small, and inspire them to change their lives; to do great things; to follow their hearts; to work hard; to dream big; and to chase after their dreams with everything they’ve got, because this is the only life we’ve got to do it in!
The long and short of it was that I wanted to make a career as a public speaker.
Some of the skills I would need, I already had. I always gave great pep talks at sales meetings when I was on the road with the insurance company. I knew how to fire up my sales team at the car dealership too. I had fired up my players during my short stint as an assistant coach at Notre Dame, during my graduate assistant year. I had learned how to talk to Hollywood types, famous people, even the president! And to do it with relative ease.
But how would I formulate a speech? How would I come up with enough to say? I didn’t want to just wing it. I wanted to be ready. I wanted to practice, and for that, I turned to my buddy Paul Bergan. He wasn’t just a great football coach and coordinator; he worked for many years as a regional director for career/technical education in Michigan, and he was great at his job. He was a real educator who knew how to inspire his own teams in his school district, and I hoped he could inspire me and teach me how to organize a great speech.
We worked tirelessly in the basement of my condo, in the very same place where the chalk talks took place. We worked with the white board, and we started hanging up poster boards all along the wall, mapping out the perfect Rudy speech that would work in front of the widest audience we could imagine. It involved some retelling of my story, and some big inspirational words; we developed a flow from beginning to end, with peaks and valleys in between, and built toward a climactic ending, just like a movie!
The problem was, I was lousy at memorization. So while all that work got me thinking in the right direction, I just wasn’t able to grasp it all. And I certainly couldn’t take all the posters along with me to pin to the wall whenever I gave a speech.
Still, all that preparation did me good, and I’ll forever be grateful to Paul for taking the time to do that with me. He believed in me. He believed I could be not only a good public speaker, but a great one. And it helps to have someone believe in you no matter what endeavor you’re taking on.
Just after the movie came out, and the media went wild for it, my prediction that doors would start opening for me came true: I got a call to do my first speaking engagement in front of a group of fourth and fifth graders right in South Bend.
I was told that the teachers had shown Rudy to all of these kids. That was a good thing. At least they’d know who I was. I didn’t realize that the teachers didn’t explain to the kids that the guy who was coming to see them was the “real” Rudy, and not Sean Astin! So when they introduced me, the kids were massively disappointed. That is no way to start a speech. One little boy even spoke up: “You’re not Rudy. You’re a fake.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m the real Rudy. I lived the life that the movie was based on.”
It didn’t matter. I had lost them right from the start. They weren’t interested in anything I had to say because the setup was all wrong. They weren’t primed to listen. They were primed to reject me from the get-go.
My speech was a flop. I lost track of what I was talking about. I lost the flow. It was just a disaster. I left that school defeated and questioning whether I was cut out for public speaking at all. But that feeling was short-lived. I knew I just had to practice. As with anything else in life, I had to find my groove. I had to stand up, dust myself off, and get back in the ring to keep fighting. If I couldn’t do that now, then what good were my speeches anyway?
So I got back out there and did it again. And again. The phone didn’t stop ringing. The power of the film led to lots of requests from all over the country. Corporations, schools, teams—all sorts of people wanted me to come give them a pep talk or a motivational speech of some sort. The movie’s power was simply undeniable. Slowly but surely, the more I did it, the more I realized I didn’t have to give a perfect speech. I didn’t have to be Zig Ziglar, you know? What I had to be, what the audience wanted me to be (when they were expecting to meet me and not Sean Astin, that is), was Rudy! The fact that I was a regular guy was the whole basis of what made my story powerful, and it was the same thing that would make my speaking engagements powerful.
I learned to get up there and just have a conversation with the audience. I learned to not be overwhelmed by the audience, not to look at the whole audience—whether it was ten people, five hundred, or five thousand—but to look at individuals in that audience to get a read on whether or not my words seemed to be resonating. Getting them to smile was a big deal, of course. You make people smile, and you’ve got ’em. I saw that right away at our film premieres, like when I made that little joke about sneaking into the Rialto to watch The Ten Commandments. It didn’t take much to make people laugh, I found. And most people who are attending a speech are really rooting for you. They want you to succeed. They don’t want to be bored. They want to be entertained, and down deep, they really, really want to be inspired.
One of the clearest examples of that lesson, for me, came around because of an old connection.
Not long after the movie came out, I got a call from Barry Alvarez. Way back in the late 1980s, when he was an assistant coach at Notre Dame, we developed a relationship through the car dealership. His dream of becoming a head coach had come true, just like he said it would—he was now head coach at Wisconsin—and he was well on his way to becoming a Hall of Famer.
“Remember that conversation we had?” he asked me.
Who could forget it? We were both locked in, dreaming of a bigger, better future. That conversation was one of those little steps in life that helps you reach your dream.
“Yeah! Of course I remember,” I said.
“Well good, because I want you to come talk to my boys. I want them to hear your story, from you. We’re playing Ohio State, Rudy, and if we win, we’re going to the Rose Bowl. Can you do that for me?”
“Oh, man!” I said. “I’ll be there!”
I went to Wisconsin the day before the big game, and I tagged along on the bus as the whole team went to a local movie theater together to see Rudy. Barry didn’t tell anyone who I was. He saved it. I was just the mystery man along for the ride.
Sitting there watching that film with a bunch of top-notch football players was powerful. Like most young guys, they were a little talkative and goofing around with each other in the theater at first. But then we hooked them. The whole theater fell silent. They started to identify with the message.
After it ended, we all went back to the Holiday Inn and huddled up in a conference room. Coach Alvarez talked to them about a few housekeeping things, and then he said, “Look, you saw the movie Rudy tonight. Now, I’d like to introduce you to the real Rudy. Rudy Ruettiger.”
They all went silent. As I stood up I saw tears coming down some of the guys’ faces. It was all I could do not to cry right back at them! It’s a powerful thing to move people, and that’s exactly what that film did: it moved people.
Barry’s setup meant the world.
Before I even said a word, one of the seniors stood up and said, “I’m gonna give the best I can. My life is gonna go on that line tomorrow for every one of you guys!” Another senior stood up and said, “Me too!” Then another. Boom, boom, boom! The energy in the room just exploded as those guys pumped each other up. It was a real inspirational moment for all of them, and all I did was stand there. It was a big lesson for me that amplified the idea of properly setting up my appearances. When the power of the film was present, and when the introduction was heartfelt, just my presence would have an impact on the audience. For that football team, the day before such a big game, it’s as if knowing that I was real, simply knowing that I existed, drove home the whole Rudy message to a point that far exceeded anything they felt when they left the theater.
The next day, those players gave it all they had. But Ohio State was a mighty foe. With about twenty seconds left in the game, it was all tied up. Wisconsin had the ball. They had managed to push within twenty-five yards of the end zone, and they had a great kicker lined up and ready to go. All they needed was that field goal to win and they’d clinch their spot in the Rose Bowl. The dream game!
But it all went wrong. Just as he went to kick the ball, Ohio State’s defensive end came around, and Wisconsin’s offense missed him. He leapt up and blocked the field goal. The clock ran out. The tie game would stand. Getting into the Rose Bowl would now, in part, be out of their hands.
Everybody’s heads went down and they headed into the locker room in a funk. But here’s where Barry Alvarez stands out as one of the great ones. “Get your heads up,” he told his players. “You won that football game. They didn’t beat you. And you know what? They’re gonna get their behinds kicked next week at Michigan State, and we’re gonna beat Indiana, and we’re going to the Rose Bowl!”
Who knew if any of that was really going to happen, but the point was that Barry Alvarez wasn’t about to let his guys get down after holding their own against one of the strongest teams going. He’s a dreamer. He’s a doer. And he’s a great coach.
His prediction unfolded exactly as he said it would. Wisconsin wound up playing in the Rose Bowl—and they won.
Watching that game on TV, knowing that my movie, and my story, had a little something to do with giving those guys the extra push they needed to get the job done was an amazing feeling. Knowing a guy like Barry Alvarez who never gave up on his dream, even though he got derailed for a while and was working as a police officer before going back to the game he loved and becoming the head coach he always wanted to be—that kept a fire in my belly. I wanted to stay in touch with people like him for the rest of my life.
Thankfully word of that first failed school speech didn’t spread anywhere. In fact, a division of Reader’s Digest called QSB, which does fund-raising in schools all over the country, wound up hiring me to tour and speak to schools all over America for a full two years after Rudy came out. Two years! And that was on top of the various calls that came in through speakers’ bureaus around the country, from big corporations and sports teams looking to fly me in for an afternoon. I never had to seek out a speech. Ever. Never had to market myself. Because of the power of the film, and the message of the film, the calls came in to me.
When the Reader’s Digest tour ended, I was contacted by Amway to give speeches all over the country as well. Another steady contract. A deal that would keep me on the road for years. I was blown away.
The reward for my preparation, the reward for being ready to tackle a new career after my dream of a movie came true, the reward for not giving up after my first failed attempts, was a career far bigger than anything I ever imagined. Suddenly, I was making more money than I ever had in my life. Thousands of dollars per speech. Thousands. In time, I found that I could make more money from a single corporate speech than my father made in a month at the oil refinery. I could make more money in a single week, if I hustled, than I used to be proud to make in an entire year! I had no idea that speakers were paid so well when I got started. And I was blown away by the fact that I could get paid the same amount of money for a speech no matter how long the speech was. If they wanted me for forty-five minutes, or for fifteen minutes, what they were basically paying me for was the impact of my presence and the inconvenience of getting me to whatever location I needed to get to on their schedule.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the whole endeavor was that the money wasn’t my motivation! My motivation was to inspire people, plain and simple. This wasn’t chasing the almighty dollar through some job I didn’t love so that I could make ends meet and then hopefully find a way to go after my dream. This was the dream. The money came along almost as a side effect.
Why? I wondered. Why did that happen?
It’s a question I would ponder long and hard for years to come. A question that would eventually be answered, but like many things in life, would only come to me after I made a few mistakes.