HOBART “HOBEY” BAKER who died on this date (b: 1/15/1892) was an American amateur athlete of the early twentieth century. Considered the first American star in ice hockey by the Hockey Hall of Fame, he was also an accomplished American football player. Born into a prominent family from the Philadelphia area, he enrolled at Princeton University in 1910. Baker excelled on the university’s hockey and football teams, and became a noted amateur hockey player for the St. Nicholas Hockey Club in New York City. He was a member of three national championship teams, for football in 1911 and hockey in 1912 and 1914, and helped the St. Nicholas Club win a national amateur championship in 1915. Baker graduated from Princeton in 1914 and worked for J.P. Morgan Bank until he enlisted in the United States Army Air Service. During World War I he served with the 103rd and the 13th Aero Squadrons before being promoted to captain and named commander of the 141st Aero Squadron. Baker died in December 1918 after a plane he was test-piloting crashed, hours before he was due to leave France and return to America.
Baker was widely regarded by his contemporaries as one of the best athletes of his time and is considered one of the best early American hockey players. When the Hockey Hall of Fame was founded in 1945, Baker was named one of the first nine inductees, the only American among them. In 1973, he became one of the initial inductees in the United States Hockey Hall of Fame. He was also inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1975, and is the only person to be in both the hockey and college football halls of fame.
F. Scott Fitzgerald idolized Baker and based Allenby, a minor character in the 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, on him. In 1921, Princeton named its new hockey arena the Hobey Baker Memorial Rink. The Hobey Baker Award was introduced in 1980, awarded annually to the best collegiate hockey player.
In 2024, ESPN did a documentary examination of Hobey’s career and came to the conclusion that Hobey was a gay man. Andy Reynolds is a leading academic and researcher of LGBTQ history and politics. He served as executive producer and co-writer of the “Searching for Hobey Baker” podcast, along with executive producer and co-writer Tim Smith and executive producer Ross Greenburg.
When Reynolds joined the project he told Outsports, after Smith tipped him off to a fascinating historical figure named Hobey Baker.
Recasting someone from the past as “queer” or “gay” isn’t taken lightly by Reynolds. These words simply weren’t used the same way in 1924 as they are in 2024. Yet Reynolds’ research has been meticulous. Despite Baker passing away in 1918, Reynolds has found a copious amount of information that points to one conclusion for the researcher and the ESPN team: Baker was in a same-sex relationship, and he was gay (or, in Reynolds’ words, “queer”).
“We basically gathered together the letters, the remembrances, and dug up a lot of new stuff as well,” Reynolds said. “This is a 90-minute podcast, but there’s a lot of other stuff under the bottom side of the iceberg.”
Reynolds pointed, as mentioned in the podcast, to what clearly seem to be love letters, bursting with emotional and physical affection, between Baker and Percy Rivington Pyne II, son of one of the country’s richest men at the time and himself a Princeton alum. Baker and Pyne lived together in Pyne’s swank Manhattan house for two years and were reportedly inseparable, becoming fixtures on the New York social scene.
You can find ESPN’s “Searching For Hobey Baker” on Apple podcasts.