Portal:American football/Selected biography/6
Hobey Baker (1892-1918) was an American amateur athlete of the early twentieth century. He is considered the first American star in ice hockey by the Hockey Hall of Fame, and he was also an accomplished American football player. Baker was widely regarded by his contemporaries as one of the best athletes of his time.
Born into a prominent family from Philadelphia, 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 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.
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. (Full article...)