“In life, it’s not about how hard you get hit. It’s about how many times you get back up and how hard you’re willing to keep fighting for your dreams.”
It is amazing how a movie can touch your life. I remember watching the powerful film Rocky just after I graduated from the University of Notre Dame, followed by Rocky II a couple of years after that. I remember that overwhelming feeling of just wanting to go run up some stairs somewhere and throw my hands in the air as I left the theater. That feeling that I could do anything. That I could conquer the world.
The funny thing was, I had conquered the world—or at least a small part of it. I had already had a Rocky moment in my real life. I had already accomplished more than anyone else ever dreamed I could. Like Rocky Balboa, I had proved all the naysayers wrong. I won. In my own way, on my own path, I won. Me! A stocky, messed-up kid from Joliet, Illinois, whom some people doubted would graduate high school, had gone on to play for the University of Notre Dame football team and to earn myself a top-notch college education.
And I was just getting started.
Watching Rocky, and later the outstanding film Hoosiers, made me think about my own story of perseverance. Anyone I told my story to was bowled over. “Your life is like a movie!” they’d tell me. I was an insurance agent at the time. I didn’t know a thing about Hollywood. But after enough people said it, I started to believe it—and I called on my inner Rocky to see if I could go do something about it.
A few long years and countless struggles later, my life’s story became a movie all its own: the 1993 film Rudy.
All of a sudden I was invited to give pep talks in locker rooms all over America. Corporate giants brought me into their boardrooms to fire up their sales teams. I was invited to the White House for a private screening. To this day, clips from Rudy play during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium and at countless sporting events around the world. The film tops lists of the most inspirational movies of all time, and if you turn on your TV, chances are you can find it airing on one cable station or another nearly every week throughout the year.
Rudy became something much bigger than me. Much bigger than I ever dreamed.
Today, nearly twenty years after the film was made, wherever I go, people talk to me about how they call on their “inner Rudy” to find the strength to follow their dreams. People line up at events and appearances to tell me about their own real-life Rudy moments—the way I used to refer to Rocky moments in my life, or my own “inner Rocky.” It’s astounding. My name, my story, has become synonymous with inspiration. And over the years, I’ve asked myself, “Why?”
I wasn’t some super-talented kid who rose up from nothing and beat the odds to make it to the Super Bowl. I wasn’t some guy with a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball who broke into major league baseball in his forties. I was a lower middle-class kid who suffered through school with undiagnosed dyslexia, who was hard-headed enough to find a side door into the University of Notre Dame to earn my degree and to dress and play for the last twenty-seven seconds of a football game my senior year. Twenty-seven seconds! That’s it! And that was the point. A point that became utterly clear to me as the years went by: what Rudy represents isn’t some far-fetched Hollywood story. This isn’t some impossible, once-in-a-lifetime fantasy that most people can never attain. It’s not the story of Michael Jordan or Peyton Manning—individuals with extreme talent they could build upon. The wisdom of age has taught me that the power of my story, the power of the inspiration that so many people feel when they watch the film Rudy comes from the fact that at heart, I’m just an “Average Joe.” Anyone could accomplish the sort of dream I tackled. The short kid. The fat kid. The smart kid. The struggling kid. The frustrated worker. The bored-to-death businessman. The housewife. The husband. Anyone. The moral of the Rudy story is that anyone with a dream can make that dream a reality—as long as they’re willing to put in the hard work and heart it takes to get there.
Some people have the misperception that I was somehow born with more heart, more drive, and more passion to accomplish my dreams than the next guy. What I’m here to tell you is it’s just not true. I found my heart, my drive, and my passion one step at a time, simply by growing up, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and pressing forward. Heck, I’m still making mistakes! In the past few years I made some business decisions that got me in a heap of trouble, but I overcame it and I learned from it and I’ll open up about what happened right here in these pages for the very first time, in the hopes that you’ll learn from it too. After all, I’m only human. Aren’t we all? And we all make mistakes. The difference between those who reach their dreams and those who don’t may just be a willingness to look at those mistakes and at all of life’s obstacles from a new perspective.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that life is a journey. A long journey. And the lessons never stop coming. Big accomplishments, big successes, even big bank accounts don’t stop that process. Not at all. To learn that life doesn’t get easier just because you’ve reached a certain goal, accomplished a certain dream, or even had a movie made about your life story may be the toughest lesson of all. Life goes on, and so do life’s challenges. You simply have to find a way to persevere and push through with all of the determination you can muster.
I don’t have all the answers. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. If you’re looking for a self-help book filled with a lot of hot air, there are plenty of those books on the shelves. Go buy one. Instead, what I offer is the story of my life. A story that’s far bigger and more complicated than any two-hour film could cover. (In fact, Rudy fans may be surprised to learn just how many of the stories from my life, even the people in my life, were compressed to their essence in order to serve the message and meaning of my journey on film. That’s part of the Hollywood magic I’ll share in these pages as well.)
What I offer instead is a story focused on a series of triumphs over seemingly insurmountable odds. A story that I hope will inspire you to take the hits and keep moving forward, to triumph over your own obstacles, and to dream bigger. ’Cause once that happens, once you find yourself dreaming bigger than ever before and leading the life you truly want to live, that’s when you’ll know that you’ve really dug deep and brought out the “Rudy” in you.