REGGIE HO
I went to college with some like Reggie Ho.
Reggie Ho was a 5’5” 135 lb. varsity athlete.
Sorry. Please allow me to do better, to be a bit more specific.
Reggie Ho in 1988 was a college athlete, a Division 1 college varsity athlete in fact, playing for a national champion.
Not undersized for wrestling, squash, fencing or as a lightweight crew coxswain. Nor for badminton, cross country, golf or gymnastics. Maybe hockey, perhaps lacrosse though a stretch for each. Rifle, skiing, soccer, swimming, tennis, volleyball or water polo might be okay.
Possibly it could work.
It did.
Reggie Ho — known as Dr. Reginald T. (for Thomas) Ho, a cardiologist today — played football at Notre Dame although he never dreamed of such a thing growing up in Hawaii.
Sure he was the placekicker on his high school team but he enrolled at Notre Dame to pursue a career in medicine. He wanted to be a doctor like his father and he was well aware of what it would take in terms of commitment. Majoring in pre-med would mean precious few hours devoted elsewhere. Classes, labs and the library. The next day? Do it all over again.
And again.
He knew that and he was up for it. But it left him unfulfilled. He felt he was not well-rounded enough. He was becoming too predictable and one-dimensional for his liking.
He decided that living the life of “a geek” was not for him. “You know, a geek is a nerd who studies too much. I wanted to be more well-rounded. Academics are important, but they’re not everything.”
What to do? Quit? Go home? Admit however reluctantly and with tail firmly ensconced between your legs that you may have bitten off a little more than you could chew?
Nope.
Walk on? To the football team? To the Notre Dame football team?
Why not? What’s to lose?
God bless people like Reggie Ho. And Lou Holtz for that matter.
In 1987 Ho was a walk-on to the Notre Dame football team as a placekicker.
(He had walked on at a varsity practice one autumn day in 1986 informing the coaches that he wanted to kick for the Irish. They told him to come back in the spring but were probably thinking, ‘get lost.’ “That’s how smart we were,” reflected assistant coach George Stewart who worked with the kickers. Ho returned in the spring and kicked well enough to catch Holtz’ eye).
He made the team and appeared in one game, kicking a PAT against Navy. The next season Holtz, a bit of a maverick himself, named Ho the squad’s starting placekicker, unseating sophomore Billy Hackett who was slated to be the one, and all hell broke loose. In a good way, mind you.
(Remarked Coach Holtz at the time, “Hackett did a nice job, but every time I charted Reggie, he was 24 for 25, or 34 for 34. He was unbelievably accurate.”)
Reggie Ho became a star and a cult figure in the process.
Wasting no time in the ’88 season-opener at home against Michigan Ho kicked four field goals (31 yds.; 38; and a pair of 26-yarders, the second of which came with 1:13 remaining and won the game) in a thrilling 19–17 Irish victory.
Having the biggest hand in a contest formally cited in the litany of “Notre Dame Greatest Games,” the kid from Kaneohe swimming in his #2 jersey was on his way. Dealing with the guaranteed instant celebrity a performance like his in a nationally televised game can engender was not what the painfully shy Ho was looking for but he made do.
Boy, did he make do.
The next week against Michigan State in East Lansing Ho was at it again. In the second quarter with the Spartans up 3–0, the sputtering Irish offense found itself facing a fourth-and-three on the State 14-yard line. No problem for Holtz; no problem for Ho, his designated ‘eraser.’ “He goes in there to erase somebody else’s mistakes by trying to get three points on the board,” Holtz quipped.
The visiting Notre Dame cheering section welcomed Ho’s appearance with the increasingly familiar chant of “Reg-GIE! Reg-GIE!” rising to a roaring crescendo and the diminutive placekicker methodically split the uprights from 31 yards away. His second field goal from 22 yards out put the Irish ahead 6–3 which turned out to be all they needed as they went on to spank State 20–3.
Ho was a hero again.
Grabbing the limelight in such fashion and the adoration that came with it was a novel experience for Ho but his success was really no surprise.
When starting kicker Ted Gradel, for whom Ho understudied in 1987, was asked by Holtz about the other kickers in the spring before he graduated he was effusive in his praise for Ho and his legendary work ethic. “Reggie Ho works harder than anybody I’ve seen,” Gradel said. “He kicks in the rain. He kicks in the snow. Don’t sell him short.”
Reggie Ho grew up with this mentality; he would kick for blocks of hours at a time when he was a high school player. “I remember him kicking outside my window at midnight,” remarked his sister, Gianna. “He would turn the lights on over the patio and kick into a tarp. Very intense and disciplined.”
When the assistant coach Stewart observed Ho kicking balls by himself into a net at three o’clock one spring afternoon during Easter break he was slightly taken aback. “How long have you been here?” Stewart inquired. “Since nine,” Ho replied. Says Stewart, “He was there for six hours every day.”
Ho tinkered with his routine until he had it just right for him, and then practiced endlessly to polish it and make it as close to perfect as could possibly be. The steps, the focus, the deep breathing, the ritual holding out of the arms and finger-waving. His teammates dubbed it “the voodoo stuff,” but Ho recognized that what others may have perceived as histrionics actually calmed him.
“…It’s to relieve stress. 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 noise not only was no distraction but rather, something that motivated him. “I use the crowd to get all the adrenaline I can. It gets me confident,” Ho observed. “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.”
The meticulous and detailed pre-kick routine, as designed by Ho, is a means to an end. The objective is to ‘groove the stroke,’ in search of the desired point of contact. Clockwork precision and the ability to generate an energy powerful enough to allow him to explode through the ball with textbook follow-through and extension every time, over and over is what it’s all about. Along with that laser-focused concentration. “It’s my own way of making sure I get to the right spot, so I kick the same each time,” Ho explained.
As it is with a quarterback or a baseball pitcher, mechanics rule. “I line my tee up, take aim — I hit the tee with my hand to make sure it’s in the ground — then I take my steps back and make a little hook. My dad [who’s a doctor] showed me the science of it, the arcs and the tangents.”
His father — and mother, no doubt — also taught him the value of hard work and dogged persistence. Among many other things such as humility and self-effacement.
Reggie Ho opted to remain a non-scholarship player, a student-athlete in its purest sense. “I don’t want to be on a scholarship,” he asserted. “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.”
Surely it was. As was carving out a niche for himself — all 5’5” and 135 lbs. of him — on the (12–0) 1988 Notre Dame National Championship Football Team.
Following that storybook season and with another year of eligibility, Reggie Ho graduated with his class and moved along.
Football was over. Medical school and then a commitment to helping people, all people was next on the docket.
Reggie Ho wanted to be a doctor, just like his dad.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in July 2017.]
