Every football fan knows what a Hail Mary is. The desperate, last-second heave downfield. The prayer that accompanies it. The term has become so embedded in the sport's vocabulary that most people assume it has always existed. It has not. It was born on a specific day, at a specific place: October 28, 1922, at Grant Field in Atlanta, during a game between Notre Dame and Georgia Tech.
Noble Kizer, a Notre Dame lineman, began praying during fourth-down plays — literally reciting the Hail Mary as quarterback Harry Struhldreher took the snap. When the plays resulted in touchdowns, Kizer offered his review: "That Hail Mary is the best play we have."
The Game
Notre Dame won 13–3 in front of 18,000 to 20,000 fans packed into Grant Field at standing-room-only capacity. Georgia Tech, known that season as the "Golden Tornado," was coached by the domineering William Alexander. Notre Dame's Knute Rockne — already legendary, already theatrical — had warned his players about the "rebel yells" from the southern crowd and delivered a pregame speech that included a fabricated telegram from his supposedly hospitalized six-year-old son Billy, requesting a victory. The child was never hospitalized. Rockne made it up. It worked.
Notre Dame earned $7,000 from ticket sales — significant money in 1922, and evidence that intersectional college football games were already drawing the kind of attention that would eventually build the sport into a national industry.
The Atlanta Connection
Grant Field — now Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field — sits on the Georgia Tech campus at the edge of Midtown, overlooking the Downtown Connector. The building where the Hail Mary was born is still there, still hosting football games, still part of the city's sports infrastructure more than a century later.
Steve Hullinger, writing for GPB on the 100th anniversary (measured from the broader era, not the exact date), connects the moment to Atlanta's identity as a sports city. Before Mercedes-Benz Stadium, before the Georgia Dome, before Fulton County Stadium, there was Grant Field — and a lineman on his knees, praying for a first down, accidentally naming the most famous play in football.
Original reporting by Steve Hullinger, Georgia Public Broadcasting, October 18, 2024.