Most people know Jerome Bettis because of his outstanding career in the NFL.
After being drafted in 1993, he left Notre Dame to play in the NFL. Later that year, he was drafted by the St. Louis Rams and it looked as if he would never turn back.
The problem is, Bettis made a promise to his mother when he left the University.
He described it this way: “I promised her years ago, sitting in Coach Holtz’s office, that I would come back and graduate.”
The promise may have been 28 years old but he kept it. On May 15, he graduated from Notre Dame. He then went on Twitter to say: “A promise made, a promise kept.”
Bettis spoke of the re-enrollment in January but he admits that the transition wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Considering the fact that he had left college almost 3 decades earlier, he was coming back to an unfamiliar environment.
Speaking on NBC’s Today, he said: “It’s so strange because I’m so behind the times. I mean, I’m a dinosaur in the sense of school. I don’t know where anything is. I’m struggling with the technology.”
Even though there have been some adjustments along the way, he met his goals and kept his promise. Although graduating was a promise to his mother, he was also thinking about his two children.Perhaps Bettis himself put it best when he said: “In my immediate family, I’ll be the first person to graduate from college. But most importantly, I have two children. For them to see dad finish a commitment that he set out some 27 years ago, for me to complete that, I think it says a lot to them.”