Kyle Rudolph: Good Player, Better Role Model

Kyle Rudolph: Good Player, Better Role Model

Time Stamp: September 4, 2023 3:52 PM

I made an NFL tight end cry. That tight end was Kyle Rudolph.

“Joe, I thought this was supposed to be a tribute to a tight end who had a successful NFL career?”

Well, it is, but to give full background and to show why I’m writing this, I thought I’d start there.

Rudolph grew up on my street and was a few years older than me. My mom would babysit him after school a lot, which meant that we got to play together.

Sometimes we would play on the same team in a two-on-two game of baseball, basketball, etc. Kyle and I would be playing against Casey, his younger brother, and Nick, my older brother, to make sure teams were “fair”, although I’m not sure it is possible to make teams “fair” when one team has a future professional athlete. These were some of my favorite times in early childhood because I looked up to Kyle so much.

There were other times when Kyle and I would go one-on-one in football. How in the world would that be interesting when he was several years older than me and had more athleticism in his pinky than I did in my entire body? A game that I used to play with my older brother Evan and Kyle would be “Living Room Football”. I would go and put on at a minimum 5 NFL jerseys (one on top of the other) and a toy helmet. Evan or Kyle would run around on their knees, while I would be able to run on my feet. They would throw the ball to me and then I’d try to run and score. When they had the ball, they’d run on their knees with the ball and let me tackle them.

This is how I made an NFL tight end, 10-12 years before he was an NFL tight end, cry. My four to five-year-old self was tackled by Kyle and I fell awkwardly. It was by no means a serious injury, but I was hurt and I could feel myself tearing up. Although the tears were coming, I tried to hold them back. I didn’t want Kyle to see me cry and most of all I didn’t want us to stop playing. But eventually, the tears came out. In one of my earlier childhood memories, I remember running to my mom and things settled down shortly after, just like most injuries kids have. What I wasn’t expecting was Kyle to cry too because he thought he injured me so seriously. Hey, I didn’t have to mention that the only way I could make him cry was for me to cry myself. He showed true compassion and at the end of it, he was more upset than I was. We went on to continue playing that day and for a while after.

Making an NFL tight end cry is always a fun fact I love having in my back pocket. When teachers in high school or college would ask to break the ice on a first day with a fun fact, most of the time people don’t want to speak or really don’t know what to say. I was the same way. What’s a fun fact about me? I was a teenager who went to school every day, watched sports obsessively, but really didn’t have much to go with, which judging by plenty of peoples’ answers over the years, they didn’t either.

I started saying I made an NFL tight end cry. It drew people’s attention and it let me tell people how good of a person Kyle Rudolph was to me. This went over well in college as sometimes fans of Notre Dame or the Vikings would ask about him. It was a completely different story when I first got to high school and he was playing on a rival team. He wasn’t an NFL tight end yet, but it was still notable that I had “made” a five-star high school recruit cry. And let’s be honest, I didn’t have much else to say as a 14-year-old freshman in high school. Even though I rooted for my own high school, a little part of me was cheering for Kyle to do well too.

Kyle moved to a new neighborhood and a new grade school after a few years. I didn’t see him as much, then he went to a high school that I had very little chance of choosing. He chose to play college football at Notre Dame.

One summer he came back to town and my mom ran into him. She called me to come up to the baseball field he was at to say hi. I was a little nervous in the fact that I hadn’t talked to him in about five or more years and now he was on national TV every Saturday in the fall as a part of Notre Dame. Kyle signed my no. 9 Notre Dame jersey that my parents happily bought me during his first season as a member of the Fighting Irish. He also provided me with my Christmas present that year, as my parents sent him two nice pictures to sign for me.

A lot of time had passed since I had spoken to him and I was very interested in what Notre Dame was like. The funny thing was, he was more interested in how I was doing. He asked how I liked high school, what I was doing, why I wasn’t playing football anymore (concussions aren’t anything to mess with) and much more. That interaction just reaffirmed how much he cared about others, which is something I had seen from him very early on.

That time I talked to him was the last time I talked to Kyle in person. I’ve rooted him on from afar and have watched his career with great interest. I watched every Notre Dame game with my parents and we all cheered when he did well. We were happy to see him go on to the NFL and would always talk to each other and ask if we had seen what Kyle had done on the field that weekend.

On the field at Notre Dame, Rudolph had 90 catches for 1,032 yards and eight touchdowns during his three-year career. He was selected with the 43rd pick in the 2011 NFL Draft by the Minnesota Vikings. It was nice to have a rooting interest in another team besides the teams that we each individually routinely rooted on.

During his 12-year NFL career, Kyle had 482 receptions for 4,773 yards and 50 touchdowns. He spent most of his time with the Vikings, but did play a season for the Giants and another for the Buccaneers. On Labor Day, Kyle announced his retirement.

He had a very good career and his announcement has me watching plenty of his highlight videos from his time in the NFL and in college. I’ll miss watching him on Sundays and remember some of his biggest moments like his game-winning catch in overtime against the Saints in the Wild Card Round of the 2019-20 that had me running around the house after it happened.

While his NFL career has come to a close, it is important for me to note not just what an impactful football player he was, but a role model for me, even at such an early age. That little story about him caring about hurting me playing football was a small nugget of what how much he showed he cared throughout his career.

He took Michael Floyd, his Notre Dame teammate, into his own house when Floyd was under house arrest following a DUI, noting that we all make mistakes and should learn from them. Kyle gifted donations to the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital that allowed them to build Kyle Rudolph’s End Zone, a place where patients at the hospital can find a place to play. This was on top of him visiting and sponsoring other events for the hospital.

When he was nominated for the 2018 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award, the Vikings released a video titled “Dear Kyle” (Don’t click the link unless you want to tear up). It shows Kyle reading letters from members of the community and the families of patients at the hospital. Everyone in the video detailed how much he and what he did for their families meant to them. The video is well worth watching.

As Kyle moves on to the next chapter of his life I wanted to say thank you. He was a great role model to me and so many others along his football journey and that should be remembered even more than his on-field accomplishments. I wish him the best of luck and will cheer him on as he starts his media career as a Big Ten analyst for Peacock, in which I have no doubt he will succeed.

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