Daniel Eugene "Rudy" Ruettiger (born August 23, 1948) is a motivational speaker

Motivational speaker

A motivational speaker or inspirational speaker is a speaker who makes speeches intended to motivate or inspire an audience. In a business context, they are employed to communicate company strategy with clarity and help employees to see the future in a positive light and inspire workers to pull...

 and former collegiate football player

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 for the University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame

The University of Notre Dame du Lac is a Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community north of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States...

, who is best known as the inspiration for the motion picture Rudy

Rudy (film)

Rudy is a 1993 American sports film directed by David Anspaugh. It is an account of the life of Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger, who harbored dreams of playing football at the University of Notre Dame despite significant obstacles...

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Daniel Ruettiger (nicknamed "Rudy") had a hard time in school because he was dyslexic

Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a very broad term defining a learning disability that impairs a person's fluency or comprehension accuracy in being able to read, and which can manifest itself as a difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, orthographic coding, auditory short-term memory, or rapid...

--a condition that was not well understood at the time. He was the third of fourteen children. He attended Joliet Catholic High School, where he played for locally famous coach Gordie Gillespie

Gordie Gillespie

Gordie Gillespie is an American baseball, football and basketball coach. He has been a head baseball coach for 58 years at Lewis University, Ripon College, and the University of St. Francis. With a career coaching record of 1,852–938–1, Gillespie has the most wins of any coach in...

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