Rudy still delivering inspiration

You remember Daniel Ruettiger — aka "Rudy?" — don't you? He was the subject of the movie by the same name that told the story of the undersized, under-talented kid who made the Notre Dame football team and became the poster boy for underdogs.

Well, this is the sequel.

What happened to Rudy where the story ends in the movie?

Let's put it this way: Remember the persistence and dogged determination he used to get into Notre Dame and onto the football team? That was a cakewalk compared to what he did to get his story made into a movie.

Rudy is — are you sitting down? — 63 years old now, 18 years down the road since the movie was released. He is a business enterprise. He has given an average of 75 speeches a year for nearly two decades, and, by the way, he'll be speaking to a writers' conference in Logan on Saturday.

Only in America could a kid make one tackle and earn a living off it for the rest of his professional life, but of course it was not the tackle that brought him fame and fortune but what he did to get on the field in the first place — two years in the Navy, two years of working in a power plant, two years at Holy Cross while coping with the challenges of dyslexia and three rejections from Notre Dame, then another four years to get on the field. After all that, he played just two plays for the Fighting Irish.

"The focus of the movie was to show hope and inspiration," Rudy said last week. "I think America got it."

America got it, all right. "Rudy" is included on any list of top sports movies, even though it's not really about sports as much as it is about the human heart. Nearly two decades later, Rudy is still in demand. He has eight speeches scheduled at various places around the country this month alone and recently spoke on the same stage as President Barack Obama at an event in Minnesota. According to Rudy's assistant, Carol, he still receives thousands of letters a year.

"It still amazes me," says Carol. "Schools are still watching the movie. He'll get letters from whole classrooms. They watch the movie at the start of the year to motivate the kids."

The last time we saw Rudy in the movie, he was sacking the Georgia Tech quarterback. What the movie didn't show is what happened next. He worked for a car dealership for the next 10 years while trying to convince Hollywood that his life's story was movie material.