NOTRE DAME FANS OF NEW ENGLAND
God, Country, Notre Dame
FROM THE SUBWAY
REGGIE HO: THE
HAWAIIAN PUNCH
By Les Taylor
After Rudy the player, but before Rudy the movie there was Reginald Thomas
Ho; an even more unlikely-looking football player than Daniel Reuttiger.
Reggie Ho was a 5’5”, 125 pounder from
Hawai’i who enrolled at Notre Dame in 1985, the final year of the Gerry Faust
era. He had come to South Bend not as a
recruited athlete, but as a student with no intention of playing football. “Even though I didn’t know what I wanted to
do with my life, I knew I wanted to focus on academics that first year,” he
said. “I had thoughts of architecture
and medicine. And when I made it through
my first year with all As and one A -, my thoughts started to drift toward
football. I figured there must be more
to life than just studying.” By then, he
had decided to become a doctor, like his father.
So, as a sophomore immersed in pre- med
studies he began thinking, “Why not?” He
decided that, “Living the life of a ‘geek’ was not for him. You know, a geek is a nerd who studies all the
time,” he said. “I wanted to be more
well-rounded. Academics are important,
but they’re not everything.”
Ho’s high school soccer experience was
responsible for the side-saddle place-kicking style. Had his older brother Mark not gone out for
the football team at St. Louis High School in Kanoahe, HI, Reggie might never
have tried the sport. “I just saw him do
it, and it seemed natural to follow in his footsteps.” William Nack in Ho, Ho, He’s A Hero ‘He
walked on at a varsity practice one autumn day in 1986, but was told to come
back in the spring. “That’s how smart we
were,” said assistant coach George Stewart, who worked with the kickers. When he returned in the spring, he kicked well
enough to get Coach Holtz’s attention, and earned a spot on the Irish
roster. Ho kicked one PAT in a blowout
victory against Navy on Halloween of1987, but otherwise spent the season as the
standby for starting kicker Ted ‘Gradel, spending his time practicing field
goals. And practicing. And practicing. Coach Holtz sat down with Gradel the
following spring before he graduated and said, “You’ve worked with the other
kickers. Tell me about them.” Gradel went down the list. At last he told Coach Holtz, “Reggie Ho works
harder than anybody I’ve seen. He kicks
in the rain. He kicks in the snow. Don’t sell him short.”’
provided an account of Ho’s introduction to Notre Dame football.
‘Such work habits were nothing new for
Ho. He kicked for hours at a time when
he was in high school. “I remember him
kicking outside my window at midnight,” said his sister, Gianna. “He’d turn the lights on over the patio and
kick into a tarp. He was very intense
and disciplined.” Last spring, during
Easter break Coach Stewart said that he came upon Ho at three o’clock one afternoon
kicking footballs by himself into a net.
“How long have you been here?” Stewart asked. “Since nine,” Ho replied. “He was there for six hours every day,”
observed Stewart.’
‘By then, Ho had worked out what would
become his distinctive ritual: the
steps, the focus, the deep breath, the holding out of the arms and the waving
of the fingers. His teammates would
refer to this routine as “the voodoo stuff.”
Because he is of Chinese decent, many people who observed his gestures
assumed that they the inscrutable strumming had something to do with martial
arts. Ho laughed, “No. It’s to relieve stress,” he said. “My fingers wiggle because I get so
nervous. My arms go off to the right out
of habit, I guess. I’d rather have them
out there than in front of me, because otherwise they’d distract me.”’
‘The crowd, though, is no distraction at
all. “I use the crowd to get all the
adrenaline I can,” said Ho. “It gets me
confident. It would be easy to be
intimidated by all those people, but I try to use them to my advantage, and not
be abused by them.” Ho’s pre-kick
routine has been designed, from its beginning to its end, to grove the
stroke. “It’s my own way of making sure
I get to the right spot, so I kick the same each time,” he said. “I line my tee up, take aim, hit the tee with
my hand to make sure it’s in the ground, then I take my steps back and made a
little hook. My dad showed me the
science of it, the arcs and tangents.” Ho arrived at pre-season practice in the
summer of 1988 as a polished kicker with the best arcs and tangents
around. Sophomore Billy Hackett was
slated to start, but Ho won it in the end.
“Hackett did a nice job,” said Coach Holtz, “but every time I charted
Reggie, he was 24 for 25, or 34 for 34.
He was unbelievably accurate.”’
‘To put pressure on Ho, Coach Holtz set the
ball down on the 48-yard line during one summer drill and dared him to score
from nearly midfield. “I can make that,”
he said. “No Reggie,” said Coach Holtz,
“that’s not your distance.” Ho went into
his dance and swung his foot, and the ball hit the crossbar and barely dribbled
over. “See,” said Coach Holtz, “I told
you it wasn’t your distance.” Coach
Holtz decided that Ho’s maximum effective range was around 45 yards, so he
assigned him to kick extra points and field goals inside that distance and
Hackett to handle the boomers. Coach
Holtz admitted that, “Initially, I didn’t think Reggie would be a good
placekicker. I though he was a bit
different and he was!”’
‘What most struck his Irish mates, as they
watched Ho practice and play, is the clockwork precision he brings to kicking
and the extraordinary energy he musters as he explodes through the ball. “It’s amazing how a guy that small can put so
much into it,” says holder Pete Graham. “It’s just a great follow-through and
extension.” That, and an ethereal,
otherworldly quality makes Ho seem as though he is here one minute and gone the
next. “Sometimes when you look at him,
you think he’s not even in this world,” said Hackett. “We can be sitting there talking and I’ll
say, ‘Reggie, what do you think?’ But
he’s not listening. He’s someplace
else. It’s like he hovers over the earth
in his own world.”’
In The Fighting Spirit – A Championship
Season at Notre Dame by Lou Holtz with John Heisler. Coach Holtz elaborated on the importance of
the kicking game and his system of developing one. ‘”It was following the Alabama game in 1986
when we fell to 1-3 that we came back and changed personnel in the kicking
game. We went with some non-scholarship
kids. Hey, I was just looking for
somebody who wanted to play”. I believe
that returning punts and kickoffs and protecting kickers requires teamwork
beyond any degree necessary in any other sport.
The Notre Dame special teams have a closeness that may be stronger than
any other bonds within the already close Irish team. The kicking game is always critical when you
play Michigan. We have to win the
kicking game, and that scares me. I know
they have a much better punter than we do.”
Americans do love their heroes.
Notre Dame fans are particularly enamored when they come in the form of
an unlikely walk-on placekicker who came to school bent on pursuing pre-medical
studies, not in achieving gridiron glory.
Enter Reggie Ho, the diminutive senior with the suddenly golden
toe. The bashful Hawaiian didn’t seem to
fit the hero’s clothes – not with more familiar Irish names like Tony Rice,
Mark Green, Ricky Watters, Frank Stams, Mike Stonebreaker, Stan Smagala and
Chris Zorich. Few Irish fans had even
heard of Reggie Ho prior to September 10, 1988.’
‘Still, there wasn’t much question that
Notre Dame’s neophyte soccer-style kicker stole the show in the prime-time
season opener against ninth-ranked Michigan.
His record-tying four field goals – even if they were from
quite-makeable distances – turned out to be ever so helpful in enabling Notre
Dame to preserve a spine-tingling 19-17 upset triumph over the Wolverines. Reggie Ho scored 13 points. He kicked four field goals without a miss –
from distances of 31, 38, 26 and, again, 26 yards away and added a PAT.” Coach Holtz typically masked his pleasure
with the season-opening win by suggesting that Ho had done only what was
expected of him. In truth, Coach Holtz
had been telling the media for months that Ho was exceptionally accurate on
PATs and short field goals. But, in this
instance, timing was everything. Ho
appeared uncomfortable under the unaccustomed media scrutiny that followed, but
there was no avoiding the spotlight of this prime-time encounter.’
‘Trailing 17-16, Notre Dame drove to the
Michigan nine-yard line. The Wolverines
tried to ice Ho by calling a time out with 1:13 left, but the little guy
pounded through the 26-yarder and earned yet another hug from holder
Graham. And what of Reggie Ho? Well, he managed to praise everyone from
Graham to snapper Tim Grunhard to the student trainer who taped his ankle. He allowed that his anatomy studies still
outweighed football in importance. And
he expressed no interest in inquiring about the possibility of a
scholarship. “I’d never take money from
Notre Dame,” he said sheepishly. Just
another day in the life of Notre Dame’s latest local hero.’
Coach Holtz described his account of the
winning kick. “When Reggie got ready to
kick the last field goal, I really wasn’t worried. We chart field goals every day. Every time we look, Regis is 24 or 24, or 22
o
r 22, or 23 of 24, and from both hashes.
When we ran the draw to Anthony Johnson on the third down, I said, “Stay
in the middle of the field.” But he
tried to break it, and we ended up on the hash mark. Michigan called time-out, and we brought our
team over to the sideline. We had
visualized kicking a last-minute field goal to win the game, and I felt very
confident with Reggie. The only thing I
felt might cause us to miss it was if we tried to make it. I said to them, “This is just like
practice. Reggie’s made this 24 of 24
times. All you’ve got to do is snap it
like in practice, hold it like in practice, and Reggie will kick it like in
practice. I felt 19 times out of 20,
minimum, we would make it. Those are
pretty good odds.”’
The Notre Dame Official Athletic website, www.und.com, as part of Notre Dame Stadium’s 75th anniversary celebration in 2005, asked Irish fans to vote on the most memorable victories in the history of the stadium. The voting took place over two months during the summer and the results, posted on August 29th ranked this game as the sixth game on the list of greatest Fighting Irish games in the history of Notre Dame Stadium.
Gordon S. White Jr. in a New York Times article entitled, Kicking Saves Notre DameSports Illustrated, in which he was a central figure. (To this day, the humble Ho claims that he hasn’t read word of it.) Minutes after the game he was approached outside the locker room by ,Bret Bisignani, a fellow pre-med student who was ready to congratulate him on his accomplishments. Before he could say a word, Ho asked him, “Have you studied your muscular-skeletal anatomy yet?”’ (September 12, 1988) wrote, “Ho’s heroics spawned a three-page spread in
The aforementioned Sports Illustrated article, Ho, Ho, He’s A Hero by William Nack
(September 26, 1988) included an account of the game against Michigan State at
East Lansing, MI. ‘In the second
quarter of Saturday’s game, the Spartans led 3-0 and the Fighting Irish were
facing a fourth-and-three on State’s 14-yard line when Coach Holtz began
looking around for his “eraser,” not the one at the end of his pencil, but
Reggie Ho, his field goal kicker. Ho is
so diminutive that he’s nearly hidden inside the giant hollow of his
helmet. He is one of the smallest
players in a major college football program.
Nonetheless, he’s Coach Holtz’s designated eraser, which, by the way, is
what he calls all field goal kickers.
“He goes in there to erase somebody else’s mistakes by trying to get
three points on the board,” he says.’
So, Coach Holtz called for Ho to even the
score. As the young man trotted onto the
field with his kicking tee, an already-familiar chant welled up from the Notre
Dame cheering section””Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE!” At the line of scrimmage, Ho went into his
curious routine, one as unvarying as the box step. With his back to the line of scrimmage, he
pressed the tee firmly in the turf, took two giant steps away from it, then two
more off to the right. Turning about, he
faced his holder, Pete Graham, stared down at the tee, took one visibly deep
breath and nodded. As Graham turned to
call for the snap, Ho swept his arms to his right, looking like a bullfighter
holding an invisible cape, and began waving his fingers, strumming the air with
them, as though he were playing castanets.’
‘At the snap, Ho swept forward, low and
hard, and drove the ball high through the uprights 31 yards away. “Reg-GIE!
Reg-GIE!” the chant continued as the players on the field celebrated the
three points.’
‘In the Irish home opener the Saturday
before, Ho had kicked four field goals in Notre Dame’s 19-17 victory over
Michigan in South Bend. That performance
in a nationally televised game earned Ho very sudden celebrity status and
fellow students began waving and hollering to him, much to his discomfort. Ho is painfully shy. “Anybody else would have been sitting on top
of the dome,” Graham said, referring to the Golden Dome, the most recognizable
landmark on the Notre Dame campus. “He
walks around now with his head down, so people don’t say anything to him.”’
‘Ho is a student-athlete in the purest
sense, and says he prefers it that way.
“I don’t want to be on a scholarship,” he says. “I do this for Notre Dame. It’s a privilege being here and playing. When I walked on, it was a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity.” Not surprisingly,
considering how refreshing his presence has been, Ho’s teammates have warmed to
his polite, self-effacing manner and have gotten a kick of their own out of his
newfound celebrity status. What’s more,
he’s so darn easy to lift up and pass around after he kicks a field goal. “I kind of like going over and picking him up
and hugging him,” says 6’3”, 279-pound guard Tim Grunhard, who snaps the ball
on field goals. “He’s like a little
brother.”’
While Ho had one more year of eligibility,
he had decided to graduate with his class knowing that when he finally walked
off at the end of the season, as easily as he once walked on, he would get on
with the things he came to South Bend to do in the first place. He graduated with a 3.77 grade point average
and was chosen a second-team Academic All-American. He was also on the National Dean’s List and
was selected to the Outstanding College Students of America in 1988. He was active in the Preprofessional Society
and in the university’s Hawai’i Club. Ho
chose medical school over another year of football eligibility and hoped one
day to practice rheumatology. “I’d like
to go abroad and help a Third World country, hopefully after medical school,”
he would say. “I am thinking of joining the Peace Corps.” Medicine runs in the family. His father, Reginald, was an oncologist who
makes his hospital rounds at 6AM on most Saturdays, while listening to Fighting
Irish games through radio earphones. His
mother, Sharilyn, was a registered nurse before she started raising her four
children, including his only sister, Gianna, who studied pre-veterinary
medicine at Notre Dame and was a student-trainer in the athletic department. Two brothers, one three years older, the
other two years younger, were both kickers in high school.
“So many of the close games in this series
(Notre Dame-Michigan) come down to a kick at the end of the game. The kickers who rise to the occasion become
fold heroes. That’s why Reggie Ho, the
Irish kicker in 1988, who is back in South Bend for a walk-on reunion, is more
likely to be recognized on campus this weekend than current kicker Brandon
Walker,” wrote Eric Hansen in his NBC Sports.com blog before last year’s Notre
Dame-Michigan game.
Today, Reggie Ho lives in the Philadelphia
area with his wife, Maromi, and family.
A cardiologist at the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, his
sub-specialty is electrophysiology.
‘Even today, patients often recognize Ho for his football exploits at
Notre Dame. It’s a good bet those
patients are reassured by knowing that he has a history of coming through under
pressure for many years. Pat Forde of ESPN.com on September 15, 2005 summed
it up best, “Former Notre Dame kicker Reggie Ho has done quite well for himself
post-football. As one e-mailer Wolverine
e-mailer put it, “After ripping out the heart of Michigan fans, he now repairs
them . . . hearts that is.” Ho, who went
to the University of Pennsylvania medical school, is listed as a cardiologist
at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, PA.
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N.B.
Since this is the first column I have had an
opportunity to submit in over a month due to a major computer crash, I would be
remiss if I didn’t thank Lou Orazio, editor of The Notre Dame Fans of New
England newsletter and blog for deciding to send my last column,
“Walk-ons: A Notre Dame Tradition” to
ALL of the readers on the mailing list rather than simply posting it on “From The Subway.” I would also like
to thank those readers who took the time to read the column and send me their
comments and observations. ‘They are
always greatly appreciated.
There are so many stories about Notre Dame
walk-ons since Coach Ara Parseghian started the tradition after arriving from
Northwestern in the mid-60s that I actually had to edit the column and make
some difficult decisions as to which ones to leave out. So, I decided to follow-up the original
column with one or two more that had to be left out. As always your replies are welcome. Kindly send to Les Taylor (aka Subway Alum –
MA, Notre Dame Fan Since 1950) lesandjill18@verizon.net.
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