Rudy (37 page)

Francis was built like me—short and stocky. I took that body and applied it to football, and later boxing, but he applied it to weight lifting. An older friend of his saw him working out way back in the early 1970s and said, “You're pretty strong for a little guy. Want to compete?” That little encouragement was all it took. Francis became a champion weight lifter, competing all over the US and making quite a name for himself in the sport. In fact, he got his painting up on the mural of famous Joliet sports figures that graces the side of one of the big train trestles in town. It was awesome! The whole family was so proud of him for that. As I mentioned earlier, my picture isn't up there. So in that sense, Francis is the more famous one in our family!

Weight lifting didn't provide a big living, of course, and running Rudy's Gym wasn't all that profitable either, even though it was a big success. So Francis did the typical Joliet thing and took a job at the power plant after high school. Sound familiar? Well, guess what? That job that was supposed to be so secure, the right thing to do to support your life and family, went away one day. He was laid off. I always wondered:
Had I stayed on at the power plant, would I have been laid off too?
It's strange to look at these things with the clarity of hindsight. Perhaps if I hadn't quit the power plant job, the job would have quit me.

Francis went bouncing around to any number of odd jobs after that: driving a Canfield's pop truck, working at Union Oil with our dad, eventually taking a security job at the mall. One day, at the age of thirty-one, he heard that the Joliet Police Department was testing for new recruits, and he pep-talked the other mall cops into going and taking that test together. They were all good guys. They were all smart. They all knew what they were doing.
Why couldn't they go and get jobs as real cops?
That was his thinking.

Of course, all of the other guys were younger than him, and there wound up being a thousand people who took that test in the greater Joliet area—that's 999 competitors for one of just a handful of open slots at the police academy! Most people would tell you not to bother, right? Especially at the old age of thirty-one.

Well, guess what? In part because Francis was older and had more experience in the world, he had lots of common sense to draw upon—and he wound up acing the test. He ended up number one on that list of one thousand guys. He enrolled at the police academy and threw himself into it. He loved it. The late start made him appreciate every minute of it and maybe even have more passion for it than some of the young recruits who hadn't figured out what they wanted out of life yet.

“If I'd have started as a kid, I'd have never made it,” Francis once told me. I feel the exact same way about Notre Dame. There's no way I would have made it through that school without all of my experiences in the navy, at the power plant, and at Holy Cross that came before it. No way! Perhaps there's a good lesson in that.

Our parents never pressured any of us to go to college. We all chose it on our own. We all went because we wanted to go. And that made all the difference in the world. Francis has probably been through more years of schooling now as a cop than any of the rest of us. But he loves it. There's a purpose to that education. It's not just throwing money at school when you're not interested in what you're studying. That whole approach to four-year colleges, as some sort of an automatic (and very expensive) step in life, just doesn't make very much sense to me. I saw too many kids at Notre Dame who weren't passionate about it, who were wasting their parents' money by blowing off classes and partying all the time. What's the point of that? Doesn't that constant production of passionless kids in our education system hurt the country? Think about it. We're churning out thousands and thousands of kids every year who have no inspiration, no dream; all they have is just a bunch of meaningless education that leads nowhere, because they didn't choose to go after that education passionately, of their own free will.

Francis had never picked up a gun in his life before he went to the police academy (except for a shotgun when he went hunting a couple of times in his early twenties). He had never shot anything at a target or range before. Today? He's a first-rate sniper. The best of the best. The whole thing's astounding! Plus, he combined his weight-lifting abilities, Rudy's Gym, and his life on the police force to influence all kinds of troubled kids in Joliet—not only through law enforcement, but in getting kids passionate about taking care of their bodies and teaching them how to be strong and confident in life. The ripple effect of his pursuit of his passion, and his later-in-life switch in careers, is massive. In fact, I think it could probably make a movie in and of itself! It may not have the cache and majesty of Notre Dame, but it's still one heck of a story. There are lots of stories like that in families all across this country. We need to pay attention to those stories. We need to pay attention to that inspiration that's happening all around us. To learn from it, and feed off of it.

I may have made a movie. I may speak about my life story all over the country, but I can honestly say that Francis' story inspires me as much or more than I ever inspired him. It's awesome.

Of course, all of us siblings were inspired most by our parents. Watching them through the years, watching my dad reach retirement and follow through on his own dreams was a spectacular thing for all of us. He always told me, “Work now, play later,” and I mostly rejected that philosophy—at least in my youth. But my dad followed that rule of his to a very successful end.

After my parents spent all of those pennies my mom had been saving to purchase a little cabin property on a lake in Wisconsin, they slowly but surely turned that place into the home of their dreams. My dad used his ever-resourceful hands to expand and completely remodel the main home and to build himself a brand-new garage from the ground up while adding a second cabin to house the kids and growing legions of grandkids who came up to visit. My strong little wisp of a mom was up there hammering nails and ripping walls apart right with him, while simultaneously turning the basement level into a museum-quality shrine to her family.

All fourteen of our First Communion portraits are placed on the wall at the bottom of the stairs . . . right next to all of our diplomas. It's quite a sight. The whole basement is chock full of photos and memorabilia from each of our big endeavors in life: trophies, awards, wedding photos, uniforms, medals, you name it! And of course, everything in that entire house has its place. My mom's sense of order never went away, even when there weren't any more kids around full-time.

My dad actually became more easy-going later in life. He didn't look so tense all the time. He smiled. He joked around. He was actually funny! Who knew? I think there's a pretty simple reason for the change: he was living his dream. He had worked hard to get there. Now, after all those years of struggle, he had produced an amazing array of successful kids, and he could take his time to kick back, play some golf, and watch all of those kids and grandkids play in the lake at the bottom of the hill that lay right outside his front door.

I also have to say, success is the best revenge, isn't it? Remember all those people who used to tease my mom and dad about their gigantic family? Who'd make fun of them for having so many kids? How many of those people would dream about having so much love around them in the later years of their lives? As the years went by, and my parents entered those years when a lot of older people start to feel lonely and neglected, they were surrounded by love. They would eventually have more than seventy grandchildren! All of them loved and adored them from the start, because they got to know them in the happiest phase of their lives. They saw only the best of them, because they were living their dream to its fullest.

If that didn't inspire me to keep going, to keep aiming high to fulfill my own dreams in life, no matter my age, I don't know what would.

I was so glad to have played a part in fulfilling a couple of their individual dreams too. Of course for my dad, seeing one of his sons play football for Notre Dame was an unimaginable high, and I did that way back in the '70s. My mom's dream was something else entirely, though: a dream that she expressed every day as she ironed our clothes.

About a year after
Rudy
's release, when my speaking career was really on fire, I missed three speeches because of bad weather. I realized living in South Bend wasn't going to work for me anymore, and I sought out a place with an airport that rarely closed. My search led me to someplace that offered much more. A land where big dreamers come to play: Las Vegas. I wasn't a gambler, never had been. But after speaking at a conference at the Rio Hotel, I fell in love with the place. Where else on earth (besides Los Angeles, which I didn't like) had men and women proven that anything's possible, that dreams can be real in such a massive way as they had in Las Vegas? A city built from absolutely nothing in the middle of the desert! It was awesome.

Of course, Vegas is also one of the entertainment capitals of the world, and it was in that town where I was finally able to help fulfill my mom's old dream: I hooked her up with some professional musicians and producers and put her into a recording studio to record two CDs full of her favorite old songs. She sounded great! She was so happy, so thrilled to get into that studio environment and do the very thing she had admired so much in all of those old crooners she loved to listen to. We still have copies of those CDs around, and we play them for the grandkids whenever we get a chance. Knowing that grandma recorded a couple of albums is an inspiration in and of itself, which opens doors for the more musical members of our family and lets them know that they can accomplish that dream too. The same way my success, and Francis' success, has inspired some of those grandkids to go on to professional sports careers themselves. When you think about it, the cycle of inspiration never ends. One dream leads to another. I marvel at that every day.

Allowing one dream to lead to another was what finally opened up a window in my personal life as well. In all those years of struggling to make ends meet while pursuing my film, I found it difficult to make room for lasting relationships. Now? With a dream fulfilled and my life busier than ever, I somehow had room. I fell in love. I got married. And before long I was starting a family of my own. It all just seemed to fall into place. After all those years.

The way I see it, there are three cycles in life.

During the first cycle, you're a child. You dream. But all of a sudden, your parents and society and schools are telling you how things work, and how they're going to be, and you get confused by it all and the complexities of figuring out what you think you should be in life.

During the second cycle, it's all about what you do. You learn how to unravel all of that confusion as you go through struggles and eventually become the person you really want to be. This is the time when you wind up doing what you have to do, not necessarily what you want to do. It's when you take a job as an insurance salesman, or a construction worker, or waitress, and hopefully develop enough to see the path you really want to be on for the rest of your life and take the necessary steps to get there.

The third cycle is when you've gone through all of that and gathered the wisdom of that entire journey, from all of your experiences (good, bad, and indifferent), and you realize that it's time to help other people learn how to get through those first two cycles on their own. It's all about giving back.

That third cycle is what my speaking career has been about from the beginning. It's not about telling people what to do. I'm not a “motivational speaker” in that way. I can't stand the idea that someone tells you to take ten steps to success.
Well, what happens if I mess up step number nine? Does that mean I can't achieve that dream?
That kind of thinking can mess with people. Instead, what I want to do is inspire people by sharing my story, sharing my experiences, opening up their eyes through the story of my own struggles and successes so they can go out and find their own paths to whatever sort of success they're seeking in life. There isn't just one way to accomplish a goal. There wasn't just one path to get into Notre Dame. You have to find
your
way to get to whatever dreams you have!

People get sidetracked by “self-help” ideas at times. Lots of books tell you to write down your goals and get organized about them. Well, what if that just slows you down? What if you're not someone who responds to that whole idea? I didn't write down any of my goals, and I accomplished them and exceeded them. I tell kids, “Just do it.” I know Nike likes to think they have a monopoly on that phrase from their famous advertising campaigns, but it's a universal truth. Just do it! Go get it done, whatever it is you need to do. To me, that makes more sense. If part of what you need to do is to write down your goals, then write down your goals. Figure it out for yourself. That's the message. I don't have the answers—you do! The answers are inside you. The answers are in those gut feelings, that little voice that God gives you to know right from wrong, and you have to respond to that gut, to those messages.