People & lives · Sport & games

The war was over and his bags were packed. He flew anyway.

Hobey Baker had a plane ticket home from France and hours to kill, so he took up a repaired aircraft for a test flight and died in the crash — a month after the armistice, at 26. Before that he was probably the most admired athlete in America, good enough at two sports that he remains the only person enshrined in both the Hockey and College Football halls of fame. He played entirely as an amateur, went to work at a bank after Princeton, and never turned any of it into a career. Fitzgerald, who overlapped with him at Princeton, wrote him into a novel; college hockey still hands out an award in his name every year.

When the Hockey Hall of Fame opened in 1945, Baker was one of the first nine people inducted — and the only American among them.

Read the whole of Hobey Baker on Wikipedia

The article comes from Wikipedia and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The introduction above is our own.