♪ Unless you're a fan of college hockey, you probably never heard of Hobey Baker.

Which would be just fine by him.

Everybody who ever knew him said he was a very modest man, but he was also probably the finest American amateur athlete who ever lived, and the only one inducted into both the American football and American hockey Halls of Fame, and who inspired a character in one of F Scott Fitzgerald's novels and was a World War one fighter pilot and was literally a household name.

100 years ago.

♪ Who was Hobey Baker even though he lived long ago there are some people who still know the story.

Like Parker Packard, who loved playing hockey at Saint Paul's School as much as Hobey did, especially when all the outdoor rinks were up and running and filled with skaters.

When you're talking, Hobey Baker, I gather what you're talking about at a skill level is Mario Lemieux.

Wayne Gretzky, Hobey Baker.

There are a handful of people Gerry Price, who knows about Hobey Baker's football, hockey and F Scott Fitzgerald connections.

When he was at Princeton.

This is the most romantic figure ever to play athletics in the college level.

In the history of the United States.

Steve Hardy, who knows turn of the century hockey as well as Hobey, played it for the Saint Nicks in New York, becoming a superstar before there even was such a thing.

Nobody has ever been promoted in advance the way Hobey Baker is, and no one has ever come through with bells on like Hobey Baker has.

But when World War One came, Charlie Wooley knows what inspired Hoby to sign up and go over there.

I think patriotism was the key.

I really do.

You had to be adventuresome.

But if you were going to do something and patriotism what drove you to do it then the flying part came second to patriotism.

But was Hobey Baker really that good, that fast, that talented?

Nobody knows for sure.

History is like that.

You never really know unless you were there.

But it's been so long since all of this happened.

Nobody's here who was there.

In fact, the only person still alive who can connect us to the family's past is Hobey's Nephew and namesake, Hobey Baker, the second.

A man as kind and gentle today, as Hobey must have been back then.

Which gives us another clue to add to the story the legend, the facts, and the myths about this golden boy of the Gilded Age, Hobey Baker.

♪ The cream of America's crop rose to the top at schools like Saint Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire, an exclusive Episcopalian prep school, where in the 1900s, American children came to be prepared for a future filled with privilege.

Noblesse oblige.

Ivy League colleges like Princeton, Harvard and Yale, and then on to Wall Street, high society and happily ever after.

For most students, coming to a world class boarding school like Saint Paul's was just one more happy step on the golden staircase to the good life.

But for 11 year old Hobart Amory Hare Baker, it wasn't a step.

It was a cliff.

His parents, Alfred and Mary, were getting a divorce.

A scandal in Philadelphia high society back in 1903.

But they were doing it anyhow, which included packing Hoby and his older brother Thornton off to Saint Paul's to hide them from the storm.

It was his home for seven years, and she, in fact, was committed to, not a nursing home.

In those days.

They call them asylums.

And he was not allowed to see her when he would go home on vacations.

He was not allowed to see her.

The doctor said, this will not help him.

It will not help her.

Very strange, very strange, the whole thing.

And very sad too.

If you were as young as Hobey, unless you found something so intense, so wonderful that while you're doing it, you don't think about anything else.

Hobey found sports and understanding masters like Chippie Scudder, who knew that athletics were far more than an activity for some boys, especially Hobey.

Because of Chippy and sports, Hobey Baker's cliff turned into the Golden Gate Bridge.

There was fear for a masters that were involved in hockey, and they'd take the hockey players at 6:00 in the morning to special little ponds that that were very well protected or quite shallow, that froze a little bit quicker.

And it was a special treat, sort of to be invited by one of the masters to, to go and play some shinny on a pond at 6:00 in the morning before you went to school.

The most fun time of all was before the winter term started, when black ice formed on Turkey Pond.

So slick.

It was just a beautiful, beautiful thing.

You could skate and skate and skate and boy, you could dribble and dribble and dribble.

And it was so smooth that the puck never left your stick.

He'd go out tonight and skate on on or on the pond at Saint Paul, in the dark.

And that's how he learned to learn to hold the puck on the stick so well because you couldn't see, couldn't see the end of the stick at night.

At night, you know.

So that was that was what was the contribution to his learning to skate.

That was one of the claims to fame you can skate the length of the rink without looking at the puck without looking at the stick, looking straight ahead.

And that is what mostly contributed.

Kobey's athletic ability blossomed within a few short years, he was playing all varsity sports.

At 14, he was playing on Saint Paul's varsity hockey team.

Playing by his side was his brother Thornton.

Two boys, one passion.

The game.

It's a beautiful game.

When it's played properly, it's like a ballet on ice and you just think a player is out there and he's on a blade.

It's not like the two feet when you run around.

Most other sports do it with you.

You know, your sneakers on.

You're on that single blade.

And to be able to to maneuver and glide across the ice and still be able to deftly use a stick, it's it's it's a, it's a talent.

So Hobey had natural ability, but he also had intense dedication.

And I think that separated him from many of the amateur athletes of his day.

He put the time in that a professional athlete would have put in, and that's what made him different.

Which set Hobey apart, but at the same time singled him out.

Something, according to his brother Thornton, Hobey both loved and hated.

Sports was his oasis in the desert, his salvation, his passion.

And to the coaches who saw him, they knew that here was someone special.

My uncle was described as a towhead kid.

But very very beautiful build for an athlete know small smallish frame but no no big weight on broad shoulders, so forth.

So they looked to him as a sign of a promising athlete, and to his fellow students too.

But instead of being jealous, they admired and respected Hobey They even went so far as to call him beautiful without a shred of embarrassment, seeming to know as only kids can.

Hobey was marked for greatness no matter what sport he played.

Hobey played football, baseball and hockey with joy and abandon.

He didn't know the meaning of the word fatigue, being able to play for entire games while his fellow players shuttled in and out.

As far as his studies were concerned, Hoby was a steady student, not a brilliant one.

He loved singing in the choir, and over the years his voice changed from high soprano to a light baritone.

In sports, everything he did look natural to those who watched him play.

To them, it was like he'd been doing it all his life, but it only looked that way.

I'm sure Hobey Baker had a tremendous amount of athletic ability, but at the same time, I'm sure he put his hours in learning how to become the player that he became.

There are very few great, great ones who don't work at the game.

Many fans don't see this, but but Hobey Baker spent endless hours practicing, often by himself.

And in those formative years at Saint Paul's, he was off by himself.

Stick handling in the dark.

What a better way to learn, so to say he was a natural athlete is a disguise.

It's a ruse and entirely misses the point about his greatness.

I think he was forced to grow up a lot faster.

I think that business of not being able to see his mother, that that's a terrible shock to a 12 year old kid, 13 year old kid, and, I would suspect that that was one of the compelling influences on his life to get him some of that iron discipline that he must have had to have been so good at so many different things without appearing to try.

But as we all know, you do try.

But in Hobey's case, at every sport he tried, he succeeded.

As far as the social sports were concerned, his blond hair and blue gray eyes and easy manner must have been appreciated by a family friend, Elizabeth Roberts.

Her proper upbringing perfectly matched Hobey's proper manners and the two of them sometimes three.

When Elizabeth's twin sister tagged along.

Enjoyed summers in York Harbor, Maine.

But all the while, Hobey looked forward to the fall and yet another year at Saint Paul's But after seven years of shelter, joy and fulfillment at his home away from home, Princeton beckoned.

Not Yale or Harvard, but Princeton.

It had been his father's school, his grandfather's school, and now it would be Hobey's.

But his father's fortunes in the upholstery business were fading fast.

Only one boy could afford to go to college.

Thornton decided it would be Hobey, a heroic choice that both Hobey's would never forget.

My dad's reasoning was Hobey Hobey will be the one who will star.

He'll be the, He'll be the famed one at Princeton and, I'd rather give him the opportunity to do that while I'm not nearly the athlete my brother is, So that's how he had the opportunity of Princeton and, being the athlete we know he can be.

In fact, my dad went on to fame and fortune in the business world.

He supported all of the family for many years.

So he was, very much a hero in my eyes and family.

And so with Thornton going home to Philadelphia to save the family's fortune and become a hero in his own right, 18 year old Hobey Baker set out for the ivy covered walls of Princeton.

Since he had already played hockey against their freshman team while at Saint Paul's, they knew he was coming, but nobody could possibly imagine, least of all Hobey, what coming to Princeton would really mean for him and for America.

♪ He could juggle five balls at a time, shoot a bow and arrow, play polo, baseball and hockey and sing in a choir.

Give a speech in the debate club and stand on his hands while going up and down the stairs.

And once he walked from Princeton to New York, 51 miles in less than ten hours on a bet.

That was Hobey Baker.

But that wasn't all.

There was football too.

By the time Hobey Baker went to Princeton, College, athletics were as big as anything in the United States, in part because a number of colleges were just developing.

And what better way to put their name on the map than through sports?

And football was the sport that did it more than anything else.

Football was a game where it was a game completely of field position.

You had four downs to gain ten yards, but teams very rarely pass the ball.

What they mostly did was punt.

You would punt the ball and you would hope to take advantage of your opponent's turnover mishap.

If you were the team being punted to, it helped to have somebody who was very good at returning punts, which was Hobby's best thing.

He was an athlete of great speed.

He was not an athlete of great size, especially in football, and it wasn't a game at that time that had 300 pound linemen, but routinely had players who weight 200 or more pounds.

He stood out from that.

He stood out from that mold.

He was able to bring a degree of or artistic degree to the game that other people couldn't bring.

It's a God given innate ability.

You know, you don't teach that.

They have that extraordinary ability to be able to do things that the average person doesn't have the the ability to do.

And when people see someone like that, it's not very difficult to recognize it.

You understand it.

We see images of Hobey playing football.

We don't have many of Hobey skating down the ice.

I'm not I've have not seen a picture of Hobey, but we can imagine that hair just waving back behind them because they didn't wear helmets in those days.

Certainly no face masks.

So there was clear identity of Hobey.

Not only a skilled player, but they could see his face, they could see his expressions, and they could see that hair, that birthright flowing behind him, just like the Golden Jet.

Bobby Hull, he was the golden jet of his era.

Did hobby think he was superhuman and couldn't get hurt?

He never claimed such a thing, but he knew he was in great condition.

He took pride in his rock hard muscles and claimed that anything that got between him and the game, like a helmet or thick and clunky pads, would only slow him down from the game.

And in the end, that's all he cared about.

The game.

And when it was over, he cared about others.

He was a man who took great pains to make sure that people didn't look at him any differently, that they than they looked at anyone else.

That there's a story of how he was riding his bicycle on the street, and one of his classmates, with whom he wasn't really friendly, but who was walking with his parents, called out to him, and he slowed down, and he came to say hello.

And he said, I was afraid you weren't going to call to me to meet your parents.

Which surprised the student, but not Hobey.

That's the way everybody said he was, but the way he was so impressed, freshman F Scott Fitzgerald, that years later, he created a character based on Hobey in his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

In it, the book's hero, Amory, which is Hobey's middle name, by the way, stands in the shadows one fall evening, watching secretly and enviously as a group of upperclassmen singing a Princeton School song marches across the campus towards him.

Now far down the shadowy line of University Place, a white clad phalanx broke the gloom and marching figures white shirted, white trousered, swung rhythmically up the street with linked arms and heads thrown back, singing, going back to Nassau Hall, the song soared so high that all dropped out, except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus.

He sighed eagerly.

There, at the head of the white platoon marched Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of college rested upon him.

And then the procession passed through shadowy Campbell Arch, and the voices grew fainter as it wound eastward over the campus.

To me, that's very interesting that somebody like F Scott Fitzgerald, who quite possibly is the greatest American novelist of all time, would fixate on this, this person and say, this is somebody I need to include in my work.

And it just shows you that you're dealing with somebody exceptional, somebody who embodied a lot of what American literature is known for.

And really, if you think about American literature as, you know, its history and what are the themes that are common to American literature, you think of two things, really.

You think of laughter and sorrow.

And if you think Hobey Baker, that's what comes to mind.

Laughter and sorrow.

But there would be much more happiness before the sorrow came Four blissful years filled with endless days of sports, followed by more sports, a flow of football and hockey that continued almost without interruption, and social activities too.

Singing in the glee club, touring Europe in the summers and studying too.

A history major, Hobey worked hard to keep his average up while playing sports, and he succeeded, but not without some tutoring.

Still, in the end, sports was what mattered, and according to Hobey, a game was just a game.

When it was over, it was over.

After a championship football game, ending the season, while his teammates celebrated in the locker room, Hobey caught the 5:00 train to New York to get some ice time in a Saint Nick's hockey rink, where the Princeton team was practicing.

Hobey played the game with the most frightening amount of skill.

I mean, you're talking when you're talking Hobey Baker.

I gather what you're talking about at a skill level is Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Hobey Baker.

There are a handful of people that fit in that category.

He knew he was an outstanding player, and yet he knew he was a part of a team.

And that's that's a rare commodity.

That is rare because sometimes people just take one or the other.

And he understood that.

And I think, hockey was probably his, his greatest passion as an athlete.

And I think he enjoyed it just from listening and reading some of the stories about Hobey.

If you don't, if you're not passionate about what you're doing, then you're really going to not enjoy the experience.

Hobey wasn't the only one who enjoyed the experience.

He was the rover, the seventh man on the team, moving independently up and down the ice, scoring like mad.

Word spread fast.

More and more fans started coming to the games.

With the fans came sportswriters writing more like preachers than reporters, trying to capture in words what it was like to watch the world's greatest amateur athlete moving like a shooting star, up and down the ice and smiling all the way.

It's not so much how great an athlete Hobey was, or why he played, or what made him a great athlete.

I think it's the way people responded to having somebody like that, you know, we're used to it now.

We're used to, you know, the list of great athletes that that people look to, you know, you can go back since, you know, from Hobey Baker time and just trace it to the present time and, you know, who knows who's beyond I mean, LeBron James came forward when he was a junior in high school.

This is the next guy.

But you know, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali and Babe Ruth.

And you know that the the line just has gone and gone and gone.

But really not too many guys before Hobey Baker, not too many people who really touched people just simply to have the ability to watch him play as Hobey Baker did.

Hobey graduated from Princeton University in 1914.

What was he thinking about as he walked away from the ceremony that day?

Nobody knows.

To one of his friends, he confessed that he couldn't imagine what he was going to do now.

In the commencement questionnaire, he left the answers to favorite field of study and political party blank.

All he knew to do was what most Princetonian did when it was time to move on.

Time to say goodbye.

Time to walk shoulder to shoulder with fellow graduates down the long avenue toward the stone canyons of Wall Street.

Could Hobey do it?

Could this perfect athlete, this golden boy of the Gilded Age, say goodbye to the joys of the hockey rink and football field, and say hello to brokerage houses, ticker tapes, dusty file cabinets and stock options.

Could he do it?

Only time and Hobey would tell.

♪ Every October for the past 11 years of his life, Hobey Baker had played football.

This October, he was filing vouchers, sorting mail and processing loans at Johnson and Higgins Insurance Company, not as captain of the team, but as a clerk.

And if it hadn't been for two lifelines Hobey could grab on to he may have lasted two minutes, not two years.

In New York City.

The first was Saint Nick's, an amateur hockey team in Manhattan, and when Hobey was at Saint Paul's in Princeton, he had played against them.

Now he would be playing for them, made up of former Ivy League players, now junior partners on Wall Street and would be bankers, having Hobey on the team was a dream come true.

The second lifeline was Percy Pyne, a wealthy fellow alumnus of Saint Paul's and Princeton who threw open the doors of his palatial Madison Avenue townhouse and invited Hobey in to come and stay as long as he wanted.

Percy was rich and Percy, thought Hobey was the cat's meow I mean, here is this great Princeton athlete.

So when Hobey got out of Princeton, he he, as we have said, he didn't have much of a home to go back to even then.

Even then.

And he got this job in New York, and, and Percy said, come stay at my place.

So Hobey stayed at Percy's, went to his job in New York on Wall Street every day or down in that area and then, then at night he would go up to Saint Nick's and play hockey.

And Percy assigned him his own personal valet, so that he could change into his white tie and tails and go out and have dinner after the game was over.

There was a lot of guys who would like to play for the Saint Nicks, but if they hadn't played, college hockey at a fairly high level, they really weren't good enough to play on the team.

And very seldom would a guy make the team that that had played club hockey or, hadn't had a certain amount of college experience.

Saint Nick's mostly played other amateur league teams like the Wanderers, the Crescent and the Boston Amateur Athletics.

But no matter who the teams were, if Hobey was playing, the crowds would come thousands upon thousands and as he dashed down the ice carrying the puck, the crowd would leap to its feet, shouting, here he comes!

You could see a crescendo in the crowd.

You know that the roar would start and and you know you're a player subconsciously you're aware of that.

And and, you know, if you have that ability to do it, you know, that opportunity's there, you look forward to it.

And, and and you just sense that, great opportunity.

You don't get it all the time.

But when you do get it, you're right there on top of it.

And, as I said, there's only a few times you can split that defense and go in and score a goal.

Don't blow it when you do it.

Hobey almost never blew it.

That's how good he was.

But did he care about the fame?

He never said he just played the game and practiced in his old Princeton team jersey, which the thousands of fans who packed the Saint Nick's Ice arena never saw.

All they saw was America's first superstar.

As Fred Hoy, a well known writer who also was the publicist for the Boston Arena, as he put it once in his column, nobody, nobody has ever been promoted in advance the way Hobey Baker is.

And no one has ever come through with bells on like Hobey Baker has.

So they always promoted Baker as a superstar, but he always played like one.

He was money in the bank.

But none of that money went into Hobey's pocket.

He was an amateur through and through.

And while the Saint Nick's team may have been pure in spirit, other amateur teams they played were not.

Filled with Canadian ringers who body checked, roughed up players and did anything to win, clean cut Hobey Baker was meat on the table, but they had to catch him first and they rarely could.

Saint Nick's victories continued to grow, despite the strategy of Get Baker that the other teams used to slash and slug and but him around the ice, Hobey was unstoppable, and when it was over, he'd go to their locker room, shake their hands and thank them for the game like the amateur sportsman he was.

But in Hobby's case, he was so successful that his appearance on the ice was nothing but dollar signs to eager promoters who didn't hesitate putting up posters advertising him whenever and wherever he played.

Hobey hated it.

He didn't want his name to be up.

A story about Saint Nick's.

A big sign, a sign outside the rink Hobey Baker plays tonight and he was very angry with that.

He went and saw the manager about it.

Said if you don't take that sign down, I'm not going to play tonight.

And he didn't until they did.

And then he played his heart out.

There's nobody alive today who saw him play.

But words have been written that come close to the experience.

Always at hockey games.

I am haunted by Hobey, by the redolent remembrance of Hobart Amory Hare Baker, as he was in the sinew and swiftness of his youth, in the nocturnes of half a century ago, at the sanctified second, when he would take the puck from behind his own net, and as the crowd rose to its feet, screaming here he comes!

He would start up the ice like some winged messenger, out of mythology as fleet and as godlike as any of them.

His bright birthright a blazing blur.

And for a lovely, lovely little while God would be in his heaven and the puck more than likely in the other team's net.

Does it get any better than that?

No matter how hard Hobey played, no matter how hard he dazzled New York and Boston fans, Hobey told his friends it wasn't like it used to be.

It wasn't Saint Paul's, it wasn't Princeton.

It was New York City.

But Hobey wasn't 19 years old anymore.

He was 25, and the sound of the crowd had begun to fade, drowned out by the sounds of war drawing closer and closer to America's shore.

His attention began to drift away from hockey and sports.

It just it had no allure to him.

It just didn't.

It didn't satisfy his needs as a sportsman.

You know you made the, or we tried to make the statement about comparing him to people nowadays.

And to that extent, I think you see some of the restlessness that you see from a Michael Jordan who was so used to being who thrived on the competition more than he thrived on anything else, and the competition and the challenge of being the greatest and the challenge of playing to the crowd night after night after night, that once he retired, he had nothing that really measured up to that.

And for Michael Jordan, he came back and played again for Hobey.

There was nothing to go back to play, and he found the one thing I think that really measured up in his mind and was able to compare to playing football and playing hockey in college was flying airplanes.

Flying was something brand new, something exciting and dangerous, but very satisfying.

It didn't take Hobey long to master the basics.

Like everything else, he made it look easy.

But according to his instructors, he worked at his flying lessons as hard as anything else he did, and it showed.

One time after he was out of Princeton, he buzzed the crowd at the Princeton Yale football game, and they recognized him from the blond hair in the plane.

And, you know, I think that really shows you how much he missed the spotlight and how much he missed the competition end of life and really makes you wonder what he was thinking at the end of World War One.

It really makes you appreciate the idea that, wow, this is a guy that really responded to the challenge, the danger and everything else of wartime.

By November 1917, Hobey had quit his job, packed his bags, left Percy's townhouse, and was a commissioned officer in the fledgling United States Air Service.

A new game had begun, with different rules and mortal stakes.

♪ Hobey was certainly sought after as a person who had a great reputation to begin with, and also had the ability to fly.

So he, he and, oh, probably 4 or 5 other guys went over in the same ship together.

The Orduna in, July of 1917.

But when they got to France, no one knew what to do with them.

There wasn't any air service, there were no airplanes.

So they spent a lot of time sitting in Paris at the headquarters and trying to figure out what to do next.

When America entered World War One, there was a lot of patriotic fanfare, but hardly any organization, especially for the Air Corps.

Hurry up and wait became First Lieutenant Baker's way of life.

And while he waited, he wrote daily letters home to his father and to Percy Pine.

So here we are, placidly waiting in Paris, without any idea of where we are to go, what we are to do or anything.

Just the bluest crowd that ever drew the breath of life.

But if I ever get anywhere near that line, I shall certainly get a boche, or he will get me.

I promise you that.

The whole process of getting things started from nothing to a smoothly running operation was a long and frustrating experience for all.

The gears of the war machine were finally turning, and Hobey's fortunes were about to take a turn for the better.

Instead of sitting in Paris hoping for a chance to fight for his country, he was going to do just that.

Hobey finally got to the front when when the Americans took over what was known as the Lafayette Escadrille, which was the the the French squadron and piloted by only Americans.

So there were there were vacancies in that squadron.

So he filled one of those first vacancies, which is how we finally got to the front.

And once there, he flew on every combat mission he could.

If there was glamor, Hobey didn't find it.

If there was glory, Hobey didn't seek it.

But he did find joy in flying.

Dearest father, this morning I took a lonely joyride above the clouds.

They were certainly beautiful.

Below all was dark and dreary.

Above bright sunshine gleaming on fluffy clouds which resembled some great plane covered with lightly drifted snow.

I managed to keep my position in mind so that when I came through again, I was about where I expected to be.

This, of course, is the difficult part of cloud flying.

Then on the leaves, usually it was a three day leave or something of that nature.

Paris certainly beckoned.

And, there was one particular, the hotel, the Cullen Hotel, at a particular bar where all the aviators would meet of all countries.

It was an interesting sort of international fliers bar.

If you were alive in those times and if you were in that stratosphere of society often to go up to (inaudible) (inaudible) in Paris and sit down and maybe hum "Getting to know you" a little bit or something like that.

It was a great time, a great time for celebrities and athletes.

And a great time for something else, too.

While Hobey was on leave in Paris, he met Mimi Scott.

They had known each other in New York, but now the young socialite showed up in Paris working for the Red cross and working to steal Hobey's heart.

She has a delightful voice, and I have seen quite a lot of her and gotten the most excited and heavenly thrill.

I never thought she was beautiful before I got to know her, and now it is the combination of all inside and out that I am looking at.

That is oh so wonderfully.

Soon, almost too soon according to Percy Pine, they were engaged.

Hobey cashed in a bond to buy the ring.

Mimi wanted to get married right away, but Hobey put their wedding plans on hold.

He was needed at the front.

He was loved by all.

I mean, this is the great thing.

He would go out and if these guys were scrimmaging and throwing the football around or something like that.

Hobey would join them and one diary that I read, written by a fellow said Hobey Baker was playing a touch with us and he said, boy, that fellow meeting the diarist, he's played ball before and it was all swelled up from that.

So Hobey was a great asset from that that perspective.

The antiaircraft spied us through the clouds and shot pretty close.

You hear a queer noise like the bark of a dog, only with a very deep note.

And you look around and see a great puff of black smoke.

I was scared up there today, but concluded there couldn't be a nicer way to die quick, sure and certain.

Before I forget, you asked about Mimi.

To be honest, I think she is in love with some man in Paris.

It seems so queer, for she made me feel so sure of her.

It was true.

An American who worked in the Paris embassy had captured Mimi's affections, and the engagement was off.

When Hobey found out about her plans to marry, he kept his shock and disappointment to himself, except for writing this to his father, it is sure now about her being in love with another man.

I believe she honestly believed she loved me until the right one came along.

Don't let us say anything more about it.

There is nothing more to be done.

There was only a war to win.

And in the final months of the war, Captain Hobey Baker commanded the 141st Aero Pursuit Squadron with success, raising his score in the air to three enemy planes shot down and receiving France's Croix De Guerre medal for meritorious service.

When the war ended, he wrote Percy wondering what he would do when he finally did come home.

Something would turn up, Percy said.

It had to.

♪ This was now December.

He'd been given his orders to come back home.

I think his private life was a little bit upset.

Through his fiancé, who had kind of ditched him.

Anyway, he was at the field, and the next day he was leaving, and he he said, you want to take one more flight?

And there was a plane that just had been recently repaired and sitting there to be tested.

So Hobey, who was a fantastically great pilot, he said, I'll take this plane up and test it out and this will give me my last flight.

Well, indeed it did.

And the strange thing about it is, as the plane took off, all power was lost.

And instead of staying on a straight course and bringing the plane down, Hovey turned back to the field, which is something no one ever would do, and even even a green pilot wouldn't have done that.

So it's always been somewhat, questionable as what Hobey was thinking about when when he crashed.

And of course, during that crash, he was killed.

♪ Percy Pine found out first.

Then the world did.

The newspapers were filled with the story.

People understood what had happened.

They just couldn't believe it had happened to Hobey anybody but him.

But it was him.

The finest amateur athlete who ever lived was dead at 26 years old.

Captain Hobart Amory Hare Baker was buried with military honors in Toul, France.

Memorial services were held at Princeton.

Percy Pine started a collection to build a hockey rink at Princeton in honor of Hobey.

Within a few short years it was finished.

Its walls would echo to the sounds of skates and sticks and shouting crowds, but none of those voices would be Hobey's.

Years later, Hobey's mother, Mary, now fully recovered, was able to move her son's remains from France to a cemetery outside Philadelphia, near where Hobey had been born.

His aunt wrote a poem inscribed on the stone.

You who seemed winged even as a lad.

With that swift look of those who know the sky, it was no blundering fate that stooped and bade you break your wings and fall to the earth and die.

I think someday you might have flown too high.

So that immortals saw you and were glad watching the beauty of your spirit's flame until they loved and called you and you came.

Nothing lasts forever.

Especially memories.

By 1960, nobody had ever heard of Hobey Baker.

Then in 1966, Princeton professor John Davies wrote a book, The Legend of Hobey Baker.

After a kind review or two, it faded as well, because nothing lasts forever.

But in 1979, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Chuck Bard read that book and knew his search for an inspirational hockey player was over.

Once I started reading his, his bio, I became totally enamored with him, and I had to find out more.

And when I did, that was really the only name I submitted to the committee.

And after they read a little bit about him, they, agreed unanimously.

I think they made that right decision in making it the Hobey.

And isn't a wonderful name?

They don't even call it the Hobey Baker.

It's the Hobey now.

And every year since 1981, an outstanding U.S. collegiate hockey player is honored with the Hobey Baker Memorial Award.

40 pounds of bronze fashioned into a moment frozen in time when Hobey came down the ice, heading for victory not only in the game but in life as well, both on and off the ice.

Those who win the Hobey are much more than good.

College athletes.

Like Hobey, they're as good as gold.

♪ Yes, he was the greatest.

And yes, all these things that that people said about him are true, that he couldn't live without having a war to fight or a game to play.

He didn't want to live in a world like that.

And you know, what he left Princeton is that is that romanticism that we started with the idea that this is the most romantic figure ever to play athletics on the college level in the history of the United States.

He was, an absolute gentleman sportsman.

But the reason he got away with that was because he was so good at what he did.

I can't help but feel that he had a sense of purpose, of God's purpose for him, and he executed it beautifully.

The talent, sportsmanship, passion and courage that seemed to give Hobey such joy in his life didn't belong to him any more than the earth or the sun belongs to one person.

Gifts like these can only be shared with others, like sunlight passing through glass, the gift of being worthy to those who played with him and against him.

The gift of wonder to those who saw him play, and to those who will play the game in years to come.

The gift of hope that they too, can be as good, as fast as Golden.

♪