Forbes...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanv...tiger-i-shouldnt-have-been-chasing-the-money/
6/11/2012 @ 10:43AM 42,699 views
Rudy Ruettiger: I Shouldn't Have Been Chasing The Money
Comment Now
Last year the Securities & Exchange Commission charged Ruettiger with securities fraud, alleging that Ruettiger participated in a pump-and-dump scheme involving his sports drink company that generated $11 million of illicit profits. Ruettiger in December agreed to pay $382,866 to resolve the charges, which he did not admit or deny.
In his new book, “Rudy: My Story,” Ruettiger accepts responsibility for his role in the stock fraud. “I fell into the same obvious trap the rest of the country had fallen into in all of those boom years,” writes Ruettiger in an advanced copy of his book. “I shouldn’t have been chasing the money.”
Ruettiger’s new book is being published by Thomas Nelson, which specializes in religious-themed books, and is scheduled to be released this fall. Ruettiger signed the book deal before the SEC charges became public in December with an eye for it to come out in time for the 20th anniversary of the “Rudy” movie.
Ruettiger spends a few pages near the end of the book dealing with the damage done to his reputation as an inspirational hero. The way Ruettiger tells it, he lost his way and became corrupted in the late 2000s, searching for quick fixes and tempted by easy money. Ruettiger says he borrowed against his expensive
Las Vegas home and sunk the proceeds into building projects that failed during the real estate bust. According to Ruettiger, he lost all of the money in the housing bust that he had saved up from his career as an inspirational speaker following release of the movie “Rudy.”
After losing his shirt, Ruettiger says he was approached with the idea of promoting a sports drink that would be branded “Rudy.” He thought it could become the next Vitamin Water, which sold to
Coca-Cola for $4.1 billion back in 1997. “That’s ‘billion’— with a ‘B’,” Ruettiger writes. When things didn’t work out, however, Ruettiger says he kept thinking of the “easy-street life of living off of those beverage profits” and decided to reverse merger his company into the stock market. “I will spare you the finer details of what happened,” he writes. “But the Securities and Exchange Commission (the S.E.C.) eventually came knocking.”
Some might find Ruettiger’s effort to deal with his recent stock fraud history to be confusing and insufficient. Nowhere in the book does he apologize or express remorse to those that the stock scam harmed—investors who were deceived into buying a stock that was artificially being inflated by a fraudulent promotion. In addition, while many people lost their life savings in the real estate bust, few became stock scammers as a result.
Also, Ruettiger’s time line is contradicted by the
SEC’s enforcement action against him. Ruettiger clearly states in the advance copy of his book that the sports drink idea came to him in 2008 when the housing bust was well under way. Ruettiger writes: “It was right around this same time, in 2008, when I started to hear people talk about tremendous profits being made all over the place in the sports drink and energy drink markets. So my ears perked up when a business idea came my way: A plan to create a first class sports drink.” But according to the SEC’s complaint Ruettiger was already CEO of Rudy Beverage and running it out of
South Bend, Indiana, in October 2007.
But perhaps the most confusing line of logic to follow is Ruettiger’s claim that something changed when he took his eye off the ball with the drink venture and focused on money instead of focusing on a dream. Throughout the book Ruettiger is preoccupied with money. While selling insurance in the late 1970s he gets excited that “my bank account kept growing” and that he “cleared $40,000 in a single year!” After scoring speaking gigs following the movie release he writes: “suddenly, I was making more money than I ever had in my life. Thousands of dollars per speech. Thousands. In time, I found that I could make more money from a single corporate speech than my father ever made in a month at the oil refinery. I could make more money in a single week, if I hustled, than I used to be proud to make in an entire year! I had no idea that speakers were paid so well when I got started. And I was blown away by the fact that I could get paid the same amount of money for a speech no matter how long the speech was.”
Nevertheless, for Ruettiger it wasn’t enough. He claims that during his speaking career money wasn’t his motivation, rather his motivation was to inspire people and the money was a side effect. There is nothing wrong with making money, of course, as long as you are not ripping people off and committing securities law violations. Now, maybe Ruettiger can make some more cash selling his book.
