This fall marks 30 years since the movie “Rudy” hit theaters and a nation learned of a pesky try-hard kid from Joliet, Ill. who worked to walk-on to the Notre Dame football team.
I loved the movie when my parents took me and my sister to see it that fall and still love it today. It’s not perfect, in fact there are some things from Rudy’s real story that I find even more impressive than the film.
However, it’s a classic and will always be way up on the list of best sports and football movies of all-time.
Now, 30 years later, we’re getting a bonus scene of the film. Check out below as Rudy (played by Sean Astin) and his dad (the late Ned Beatty) explain what makes Notre Dame football so special.
Those 97 seconds does a tremendous job explaining what much of Notre Dame fandom is all about. For many of us that fandom started generations ago and has been passed down.
I couldn’t tell you the first Notre Dame football game I watched as a kid but I can tell you that by the time I was six and Rick Mirer, Jerome Bettis, and Reggie Brooks were ripping apart defenses in 1992, I was already fully obsessed.
And I can look back and be fairly certain that more than a small part was because of having a grandfather that spoke of Notre Dame football very similarly to the way Beatty does in that deleted scene.
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