Also, the Hobey Baker Award for the player of the year will be given out Friday. The finalists are Cam Atkinson of Boston College, Andy Miele of Miami of Ohio, and Matt Frattin of North Dakota.
Here is a Sports Illustrated article about Hobey Baker I remember reading in high school. An excerpt:
But Hobey was much more than the sum of his achievements. He was the beau ideal of American sport, a hero in every particular. He was, by our standards, a small man, only 5'9" and 160 pounds, but not so small at a time when the heaviest of football linemen weighed barely 200 pounds. And he was so flawlessly proportioned, so impossibly graceful in body and manner, that he seemed to tower over his fellows. With wavy blond hair and soft blue-gray eyes, he was among the handsomest of men, so disarming in appearance that his contemporaries at Princeton were not embarrassed to call him beautiful. Add to all this a humble manner, a noble character and what his biographer, John Davies, calls "a foreboding, a sense that Hobey was somehow playing out a Greek tragedy," and you have the stuff of literature.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who entered Princeton in the fall of Hobey's senior year, 1913-14, saw him as "an ideal worthy of everything in my enthusiastic admiration, yet consummated and expressed in a human being who stood within ten feet of me," according to Davies. It is no accident that the protagonist of Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, is named Amory Blaine or that Hobey should appear as a character named Allenby. Fitzgerald describes Amory sitting on the steps of his Princeton rooming house as "a white-clad phalanx" of singing students passes by: "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 the college rested on him, that his hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines."
Fitzgerald biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote that in the Princeton of that time, "varsity football players were looked upon as demi-gods, and 'Hobey' Baker...loomed so high in the heavens that he was scarcely visible. But Baker had the common touch. Now and then he came down from Olympus to fraternize with the freshmen, and Fitzgerald actually spoke to him one day in October."
John Tunis, author of innumerable sports novels for boys, found the inspiration for his immaculate heroes in Hobey. Tunis wrote: "The whole atmosphere was electric when [Hobey] was playing. Everybody would just stand up when he got the puck or caught the punt. Never wore a headguard in football, and I remember that great shock of blond hair—Hobey standing waiting all alone. He was the only player on the field you looked at, the only player you saw.... He did everything with a kind of showmanship that wasn't showmanship because it was natural to him. He was a kind of panther. His coordination and footwork were so wonderful that he could take chances and do things that others wouldn't dare to.... He would drop-kick, tackle and run with a kind of feline intelligence, grace and charm—he would make everything look so easy. Never was anybody like Baker."
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