Rudy, and My Lack of Philosophical Direction with Sports

Having heard of Rudy, but never actually have watched it until this week, I was kind of shocked by the plotline. Growing up with people chanting Rudy’s name similar to the ending scene, I had presumed that it was just another “based on a true story” film that some franchise decided to decimate with heartwarming moments of victory and all that jazz about some team or person who became undefeated and won everything. In Rudy, this was not the case by a long shot. He was a mediocre player at best, short, lower middle class with no fat chance of getting to live his dream as being a football player for Notre Dame. He did actually manage to finally get in after rejection for multiple semesters, and he did actually get to be on the football team, but he was no elite player. 

What I admired most about the film, was the fact that it was about an “average” guy not giving up, managing to still in some sense live his dream. Heather Reid’s “Sport, Education, and the Meaning of Victory” deals with the modern meaning of victory, as winning  is found more important than other ideals of sports and education. I thought this was interesting because Rudy isn’t about a team winning, nor is it about Rudy winning per se. He only made it to the field in uniform because his teammates saw that Rudy had spunk and willpower. Even in the educational aspect, it took Rudy practically three years of countless rejection to finally make it into Notre Dame because according to modern meaning of victory, he was a failure.  

Notre Dame is a catholic school, and Rudy plus his entire family is Catholic, which was part of the film’s plot. Rudy spoke to a catholic priest who worked with Notre Dame, got into a catholic college near Notre Dame, and even when Rudy wanted to give up, we see him sitting in the pews of the catholic church, praying and contemplating. 

In “Federer as Religious Experience”, Wallace speaks about how serious people get with sports, and how it can be similar to one’s religion. Rudy’s father was a die-hard fan of Notre Dame, and treated football as a religious experience, especially when his son got onto the field.  So it makes sense, that the family and Notre Dame’s undertones of Catholicism was put into the film, because it does affect the emotional aspect of the film and how it affects the viewers. Affecting the viewers, in the sense that the viewers have some personal ties to religion in a positive way.