In Reggie Ho’s career as a walk-on kicker in South Bend he was 9-12 on field goals, all of which were converted during the 1988 National Championship season. (Photo: Courtesy University of Notre Dame)
Notre Dame gridiron legend continues his legacy as a cardiac electrophysiologist
Notre Dame last sat atop the college football world in 1988. That run toward the National Championship began when place kicker Reggie Ho, the most unlikely of heroes, stepped up to lead the Irish to a 19-17 victory in the season opener against Michigan.
Against the seventh-ranked Wolverines, No. 13 Notre Dame could never get its offense fully clicking. The Irish moved the ball into scoring territory often, but the drives continued to stall. With no other options, Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz was continually forced to turn to Ho, a 5-foot-5, 135-pound pre-med student from Hawaii who had walked onto the team the previous season.
“He had to get his jersey in the bookstore,” joked former USC quarterback Pat Haden during the CBS broadcast of the game. “I don’t think the team had one that fit him.”
As out of place as he looked on the field, Ho turned in a performance for the ages. The future cardiac electrophysiologist was surgically perfect on the night, splitting the uprights on a point-after-touchdown (PAT) attempt and then four more times on field goals of 31-yards, 38-yards and two kicks of 26-yards.
Ho’s final field goal served as the game winner with 1:13 remaining in the fourth quarter. The victory became forever known in Irish lore as “The Reggie Ho Game.”
“It was not only about me,” Ho says. “It was the offense getting me down to the goal line so I could make those field goals. It was (punt returner) Ricky Watters. It was the defense. It was all of those things. Some people call it ‘The Reggie Ho Game.’ But I never really thought about it that way. It was really a team effort by all of us to win that game.”
Replacing 1987 Heisman Trophy winner Tim Brown as Notre Dame’s returner, Watters scored the only touchdown of the game for the Irish with an 81-yard punt return in the first quarter. Watters, who would go on to become an NFL superstar and is widely considered a Hall of Fame snub, knows that Ho is a humble person. But Watters is not buying what his old teammate is selling.
“We wouldn’t have won that game without him,” Watters says. “He was such a great kicker. He just did such a great job in crucial situations. He came out there and saved the day for us.”
But becoming a Notre Dame legend was just the beginning of Ho’s story. He remained an integral part of the 1988 National Championship team and went on to graduate from Notre Dame in premed. After finishing medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, he entered cardiac electrophysiology, one of the most complex subspecialties in medicine. He has since become world-renowned as a physician as well as for the papers he has published while practicing at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia.
As beloved as Reggie Ho is around Notre Dame, Dr. Reginald Ho is perhaps even more highly regarded in the world of medicine.
“A walk-on kicking the winning field goal is just an unbelievable story,” says Hugh Calkins, a cardiac electrophysiologist and the Catherine Ellen Poindexter Professor of Cardiology at Johns Hopkins. “As a physician, though, Reggie has had a very outstanding career. He has an athlete’s mentality where he is there to win and do a good job under high pressure and deliver when it counts. That’s what EP (electrophysiology) is all about. In situations where you have a complication or something goes awry, you have to be ready to respond in that moment of crisis. He clearly has what it takes to do that. He’s been very successful.”
The Man Who Walked On
Becoming a college football player or a cardiac electrophysiologist requires immense grit and determination. Those qualities are ingrained within Ho.
Ho grew up in Hawaii. His father, Reginald, was a medical oncologist and hematologist. Ho attended St. Louis High, a historic football factory that has produced players like Marcus Mariota and Tua Tagovailoa.
A serious student and a devout Catholic, Ho left the paradise of the South Pacific for somewhat less scenic South Bend, Indiana so that he could attend Notre Dame. While strolling along the same paths as “The Four Horseman” and attending classes in the same buildings as “The Gipper,” Ho decided to do what many young men dream about when they are accepted into Notre Dame.
Ho decide to join the football team.
Kickers have always been a bit of an oddity in the world of football. Ho was strange even among the unusual, though. No one would peg the small, studious Ho as a college football player. The Irish coaching staff certainly did not. Holtz cut Ho the first year Ho tried to walk onto the team.
Many, perhaps most, people would have given up their dream of playing football right then. Ho is not most people, though. He spent the next year practicing, and through grit and determination, made the team in 1987 and by 1988, Holtz named him Notre Dame’s starting kicker.
Despite not fitting the mold of a college football player, Ho meshed well with his teammates.
“Reggie is one of the coolest guys,” Watters says. “Kickers don’t get much respect. Sometimes it’s like they’re not even part of the team. But Reggie was part of our team. We saw him as part of our team. He was just a great guy.”
Ho finished the 1988 season 32 of 36 on PATs and made 9 of 12 field goals. In Notre Dame’s 34-21 victory over West Virginia in the 1989 Fiesta Bowl, Ho converted 4 of 5 PATs and split the uprights on a 32-yard field goal, helping Notre Dame seal the National Championship.
“It’s like the world to me to have been a part of a fraternity of brotherhood of young men who were all trying to achieve the same goals,” Ho says, of winning the national title.
As successful as Ho was on the football field, he never allowed sports to take away from studying.
Ho essentially lived in the Notre Dame library throughout his collegiate football career. The season opener against Michigan ended after 10 p.m., so Ho could not get to the library that night. The next week, though, after a 20-3 win at Michigan State, Ho says that he got off the team bus and went straight to the library to study. That was just one of many wins that Ho recalls celebrating among books that season.
The reality of how challenging it is to play football at a championship level while studying for a career in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is difficult to overstate.
Kevin Nosbusch anchored the defensive line during Notre Dame’s 1973 National Championship season. In the Sugar Bowl against Alabama, Nosbusch made what might be the most important tackle in the storied history of Notre Dame when he delivered a crushing hit on Crimson Tide running back Mike Stock in the backfield. Nosbusch caused a fumble that was recovered by linebacker Drew Mahalic. On the next play, Irish running back Eric Penick found the end zone on a 12-yard run. The chain of events begun by Nosbusch changed the momentum of the game and spurred Notre Dame to victory in the de-facto National Championship Game.
After graduating from Notre Dame, Nosbusch went on to a long career working for IBM.
“When I was going to school, and I was going to school, it was very time consuming,” Nosbusch says. “If you were really there seriously, there wasn’t a whole lot of extra time to do anything. For Reggie Ho to be the standout he was, it had to be a couple of things: he was brilliant, he was a totally awesome kicker, and he was pretty much a team guy. That’s really the only way to make it happen.”
Nearly 40 years later, Ho has a difficult time explaining just how he was able to accomplish everything he did while at Notre Dame.
“I look back and think, ‘Oh my goodness, I guess I did come pretty far,’” Ho says. “But when you’re going through all the trials and tribulations, you’re not really thinking about that. You’re just putting your head down and just driving through and trying to be successful at what you do.”
The Faithful Doctor
In his salad days at Notre Dame, Ho was not completely sure about his career path. At one point, he had pondered becoming an architect. He decided on a premed major when he found that he had the same love for biological sciences as his father. After graduating from Notre Dame, Ho was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Penn had a prestigious program in the relatively new field of cardiac electrophysiology in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Ho was captivated by the field.
Cardiac electrophysiology is the practice of medicine focusing on diagnosing and treating heart rhythm disorders. It is a unique subspecialty in that physicians do a little bit of everything. Doctors execute diagnostic procedures, administer drugs and perform curative procedures including surgery.
“It’s the greatest sub-specialty of the greatest specialty within all of medicine,” says Ronald D. Berger, a cardiac electrophysiologist and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins. “Arrhythmias—heart rhythm disorders—are just so fascinating. I often say that God created arrhythmias just for my titillation, just for my thrill and excitement. Some of them are just so interesting and just so damn elegant.”
Berger says that in order to be successful within EP, a doctor must have several distinct phenotypes: The puzzler, who can sleuth out problems; The tinkerer, who is interested in the cutting-edge technology of electrophysiology; And the surgeon, who is courageous enough to fix a patient with the steel of a scalpel. It is also a growing area of medicine, meaning that there is much need for research.
Ho embodies those phenotypes.
Ho has earned recognition within the world of cardiac electrophysiology with the papers he has published including original research, case reports, review articles, editorials and educational electrophysiology papers. His work has focused on arrhythmia mechanisms, supraventricular tachycardias, electrophysiology diagnosis and catheter ablation. He has been published in well-respected journals such as Heart Rhythm, Pacing and Clinical Electrophysiology (PACE), and JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology.
On top of his publishing record, Ho is considered to be an extraordinary practitioner.
One reason for his success as a physician is that Ho treats performing a procedure much the same way he treated kicking a field goal.
“I’m always playing football,” Ho says. “In football, you prepare both physically and mentally for the kick. It’s the same thing in medicine. In medicine, I don’t get super nervous, but there’s always a little bit of anxiety. You want to make sure that your patients do well and that they don’t have complications. High pressure games helped me to handle pressure. Now, instead of a kick, a patient’s life is in my hands. That’s obviously more important.”
Ho turns to his Catholic faith when the pressure mounts. At Notre Dame, Ho would pray at the famous Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes before football games. In an exquisite bit of irony, the five-foot, five-inch replica of the Blessed Mother stands exactly the same height as Ho.
Now, Ho speaks with God before entering the procedure room.
“My faith is everything,” Ho says. “To this very day, before I do a procedure, I have a little short prayer to ask God to help me with the patient.”
The Legacy of a Hero
It has now been 38 years since Ho and Notre Dame won the National Championship. The aftermath of raising the banner was one of the things that made the experience so extraordinary for Ho.
“The wonderful thing that came out of that year was not only winning the National Championship but having friendships that last a lifetime and being part of this brotherhood,” Ho says. “We’ve kept in touch as teammates over the last, almost 40 years. It’s been really special.”
Ho continues taking lessons learned from his days playing football into his medical practice and his daily life.
“Coach Holtz was quite a role model in terms of work ethic and perseverance and being relentless and paying attention to details,” Ho says. “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about such things in my life to make myself better and help patients.”
When looking back on all he has accomplished, Ho, a 5-foot-5, 135-pound walk-on turned Irish legend, turned wildly successful physician, hopes that his story, especially his faith, can help inspire others.
“If it wasn’t for God, I wouldn’t be here,” Ho says. “It may sound cliché, but God is very important in my life. We all go through struggles in life, and He’s been there for me. He’s essential to my life.
“It’s very difficult in this world. There’s so many pressures. We see so many kids who lack self-confidence, or they are bullied, or they’re having a hard time in life. I would be ecstatic if what I do could inspire those kids, or help motivate them, or help them in any way meet the challenges of life and find confidence to do what they want to do and be proud of themselves.”
Following his stellar 10-year career in the NFL, Ricky Watters is now working as a motivational speaker. He is awed by the legacy of his friend and teammate.
“It makes sense to me what he’s doing now,” Watters says. “I’m so proud of him. I know whoever he’s working on as a doctor, he cares about them. That’s the guy I would want (as my doctor). I want the guy who focuses and is just about doing his job and making it happen. Somebody who has ice water in his veins. Reggie was a hero at Notre Dame and he’s a hero now.”
Stephen Alexander is the son of 1973 Notre Dame linebacker Drew Mahalic. He co-authored Eric Penick’s autobiography, “A Notre Dame Man: The Life, Lore and Runs of Eric Penick.” The book spent 14 months on the Bestseller list and is now a featured book at the Notre Dame Bookstore. It is available on Amazon.com, here.
In 2025 Stephen wrote this for Fighting Irish Preview: Remembering Erick Penick .