DALLAS — Editor's note: The above interview is from Aug. 30, 2021.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.
It’s a prayer that millions of Catholics say every day worldwide, but many football fans know the Hail Mary as a last-ditch football play, a 50-yard prayer of a pass where the chances of catching it are “slim to none,” in the words of former Cowboys WR Drew Pearson.
And most football fans know that play because of Pearson and Cowboys QB Roger Staubach. It was on this day in 1975 that Staubach popularized the “Hail Mary” play with a 50-yard game-winning touchdown pass to Pearson to get the Cowboys a playoff win against the Minnesota Vikings.
To set the stage: Minnesota is up 14-10. There are 32 seconds left. Dallas has the ball at the 50. Time for one more play. Staubach throws a high-arching bomb down the sideline, connecting with a sprinting Pearson at the 5-yard-line. Touchdown and game, Dallas.
The play was a mirror of another Staubach-Pearson connection from 1974’s Thanksgiving game against the Washington Football Team. That year’s play was on the left. This year’s was on the right.
“It was a Hail Mary pass,” Staubach told reporters after the game. "I just threw it up there as far as I could."
"It was the most thrilling catch of my career,” Pearson said at the time. “It was unbelievable, tremendous, fantastic. What more can I say?”
The Hail Mary play is now in the popular lexicon, thanks to Staubach, Pearson and America’s Team. But the Heisman-winning Staubach actually used the play years before, when he was the quarterback at the U.S. Naval Academy. The Catholic Staubach described a 1963 touchdown pass against Michigan as a “Hail Mary play.”
The term had been used in college football circles before that, too. It originated – where else?—at Notre Dame, where players literally said a Hail Mary in the huddle before a 6-yard touchdown play against Georgia Tech in 1922. They scored, so they tried it again before another 6-yard touchdown play. It worked again, and players started calling it “the Hail Mary play.” Years later, Notre Dame would use it again, as would Georgetown, another school affiliated with the Catholic Church.
But it was Hall-of-Famers Roger Staubach and Drew Pearson who made the longest-lasting impression on the American public.
“The Blessed Virgin thinks a lot of me, anyway, I got her on the map,” Staubach joked in a 2015 documentary for the NFL. “There’s always a time in our life when we need a Hail Mary.”