Rudy Was a Fluke

In 1993, a young actor played a real football legend. A guy who barely made it at Notre Dame. Short. Untalented. But more determined than anyone else on the team in 1976. His name was Rudy Ruettiger. And that actor was Sean Astin.

But this isn’t a story about Rudy.

That was Sean Astin’s 16th movie. By then, he was already a household name from The Goonies and Toy Soldiers. And if you are younger than 30, you might not even know who Sean Astin is. After Rudy, he never had another leading-man moment. Sure, he went on to do Lord of the Rings and people loved him in that — a supporting role.

Was it Rudy that changed his path? I doubt it. Even if Sean hadn’t done Rudy, I bet he still lands Lord of the Rings and has pretty much the same career.

That’s a convergent path. No matter which branch you take, the outcome ends up the same. Sean was a family man, not chasing the Hollywood lifestyle, and his trajectory feels… inevitable.

But this isn’t a story about Sean Astin.

We humans are pattern-making machines. We see images in toast, for Christ’s sake. Literally Christ. In toast.

And because of that, we love to look for patterns in everything. Steve Jobs’ morning ritual. What billionaires eat for breakfast. “That’s the ticket. That’s the formula for me!”

But Brian Klaas argues in his book Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters that while convergent paths exist — like how eyes in all kinds of species converge on rods and cones — what we’re missing are the contingent paths.

The messy, fragile, haphazard ones.

Take Velcro. If George de Mestral hadn’t taken his dog for a walk in the 1940s and gotten covered in burrs, maybe he never puts one under a microscope. Maybe Velcro never exists. Or maybe someone else stumbles into it a decade later. Who knows?

That’s the point. You can’t know. There are too many chaotic variables. And that’s what makes contingent paths so fascinating. Our lives are built on random accidents stacked on random accidents.

But instead of making us feel powerless, Klaas flips it. If little flukes like burrs on a dog can change the world, then the small things you do can too. You matter. You’re the butterfly.

Rudy had a couple of kids in their very first film roles. Barely noticeable. One played the quarterback. Totally forgettable.

But on that set, those two nobodies met. They became friends. And two years later they wrote and produced their own movie about how dumb and hard it was to try to make it in Hollywood.

“You’re so money.”

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve even said it.

That line came from Swingers. From Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn — who met as 20-year-olds on the set of Rudy.

Swingers launched them. And if Swingers doesn’t happen, do we ever get Favreau directing Iron Man? Do we even have the Marvel universe as we know it? Or does Favreau give up, disappear, and never get the shot to create one of the biggest movie franchises in history?

Who knows.

But that’s the whole point. The flukes matter. Which inspires me to keep putting stuff out into the world. Because who knows how my little stone ripples. I just know it does.