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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar. Every year the best college hockey player is awarded what's known as the Hobey Baker Award. It's named after a legendary player in the history of the sport. Today, Hobey Baker may be the name of a trophy, but when he was an active hockey player, he was a national celebrity. Baker came of age in the early 20th century, growing up in a wealthy family.

He learned to play hockey at the prestigious St. Paul's boarding school. Then he studied at Princeton where he excelled in football and hockey, and really embodied the idea of big man on campus. Fun fact, his admirers included classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald. There's a new podcast that tells the story of Hobey Baker, including his incredible athletic achievements.

We also learn about Baker's tragic death in World War I and also evidence about Baker's sexual identity that implies he had a male lover. The three-part podcast is out now. It's called Searching for Hobey Baker from ESPN's 30 for 30 Podcasts. Executive Producer Andy Reynolds joins me to discuss the show. Hey, Andy, welcome to WNYC.

Andy: Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. Let's just start at the beginning. Hobey Baker was born in a wealthy suburban Philadelphia in the late 1800s. What kind of situation was he born into?

Andy: Well, it was interesting because he was born adjacent to wealth. His father had a fairly successful upholstery store and business. They started to put leather on the new cars that were being made. Then in 1907, the business crashed pretty hard. He came from money. He was adjacent to money, but then he had that classic fall from the real high-level finances and went off to boarding school in New Hampshire.

Kousha Navidar: Right. Baker went to St. Paul's, which is the boarding school where, what you're saying, adjacent, many of America's most wealthy families would send their sons for their education. What does St. Paul's provide young Hobey that's key to his development as an athlete and a person?

Andy: Well, the interesting thing was that St. Paul's is the cradle of hockey in America. They had the first official games, a schoolmaster in the late 1900s, went up to Canada and brought back real parks and brought back real hockey sticks. They had, at that time before the impacts of climate change, ponds that were frozen over for three to four months of the year. They had these beautiful idyllic ponds where they would play hockey.

Hobey was at this cradle of hockey and just stood out as the wonder kid, the most amazing, skillful player they'd ever seen. All these stories about he did 10,000 hours of training. He would skate in the dark so he didn't have to look at the puck. From a very early age, he stood out in almost every sport, but especially in hockey.

Kousha Navidar: What was hockey like back then? We're talking about the turn of the century, right, or just after? Is hockey a popular sport in America back then?

Andy: It's really just emerging but it is popular once you get into the early 20th century. Hobey begins to dominate the prep school scene in the 1907, '08, '09 period. Then he goes to Princeton University in 1910. At least by that stage, Ivy League sports, hockey and football are the only game in town. They are the NFL, the NHL, everybody wraps into one, because he's such the standout player in both of those sports, he gets this reputation of being really he's like Tom Brady and Michael Jordan. Then eventually like a Pat Tillman sporting war hero. He sort of, all these celebrities wrapped into one.

Kousha Navidar: Back then, obviously it was very difficult to find any footage of playing hockey. What was it like for you to make this podcast? Where did you go to find out and to characterize the way that Hobey played?

Andy: Well, fortunately, we have a lot of first-person accounts, and we have a lot of photographs. As you said, unfortunately, there's no footage. That's one of the tough things about making a visual documentary about Hobey is that we don't have good footage. What we have are very detailed recollections from his classmates and his friends of how he played. I should say that my co-executive producer Tim Smith was the person who originally was looking at the story. He grew up in Princeton and he'd been wrestling with a way to tell this story for decades, really.

Then when I moved to Princeton in 2020 because of my focus on LGBTQ representation, he asked me to partner with him. Then we partnered with the fabulous sports producer, Ross Greenburg. Basically what we had to do was do a forensic deep dive into this man's life and try and discover not just what had been written before, but everything that was shedding light upon the layers of his character from other friends and from other experts. The other helpful thing for us was that he was front-page news. Every game he played in was in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, or The Canadian Press. We have a lot of first-person narratives of how good he was.

Kousha Navidar: How good was he? What did they write in The New York Times that made you think, "Wow, this person was really a standout"? What language did they use?

Andy: Whenever Hobey was discussed, it was always, "Hobey Baker and the rest of the Princeton team." They would even put his name on the awnings outside the St. Nicholas Rink in Manhattan.

Kousha Navidar: Wow.

Andy: It was Hobey Baker and the rest. He actually found this really upsetting. He was such a non-arrogant person that he hated to be called out individually. He did a couple of things. He got his trainer to shave down the corners of his skates to make them rounded, which allowed him to be much faster and allowed him to be much swifter and more mobile on the ice. No one had done it before. His trainer would, in the middle of the game, shave down the sides a little bit more. That is the standard now for hockey players today.

He had this ability to skate without looking at the puck, but it also had this amazing speed. He would round his own goal two or three times, building up ahead of speed, and then just cut through the opposition. The crowds would shout, "Here he comes, here he comes." It was like a moment, he was the one person you watched on the field, on the ice rink. It's hard to say how he would do in modern sports.

He wasn't violent. He was roughed up all the time, but he would go in the locker room and shake the opposition's hands even after they'd beaten him down with their sticks. He was the first American player that the Canadians offered money to come and play in Canada. He was such an amateur and revered amateurism that he would never play for money. He was offered something like $20,000 in 1914 to play in Canada because he was seen as the greatest American hockey player of his time.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking to Andy Reynolds, who's the Executive Producer of a new three-part podcast from ESPN's 30 for 30. It's called Searching for Hobey Baker. It's out now. It talks about one of the first great hockey players in America, Hobey Baker, who a lot is not known about.

Andy, you mentioned this idea of guilt or at least Hobey feeling like he didn't want to be singled out amongst his other players. There's a lot that goes into that also with attending Princeton. Hobey goes to Princeton, but it's not without some guilt due to the consequences of the 1907 financial crisis. What happened in 1907, why does Hobey feel guilty about that?

Andy: He has an older brother, Thornton, and they're both, both at St. Paul's together. The father, Alfred Baker, says to the two boys, "I can only send one of you to college." It's quite a modern story. "I only have the money now to send one of you to college," and it'll be Princeton because Alfred went to Princeton.

Effectively Thornton, the older brother was supposed to go but Thornton knew that Hobey was such a phenomenon that he said, "No, you should go. The younger brother should go, I will go and take over the family business." Thornton sacrificed his college career for Hobey to go. Hobey never forgot that, and always adored his brother for giving him that opportunity and space. It was a Sophie's Choice moment for the father.

Kousha Navidar: Did you see that affect Hobey when you were researching his character both in hockey and out for the rest of his life? Did that leave a mark on him?

Andy: Well, I'm sure it did. The interesting thing about Hobey was that leaving aside his loves and his successes, he was a preternaturally decent, kind, nice person. One of the things that runs through all the stories about him is his generosity, his lack of arrogance, his lack of ego. He always looked out for everybody else. The fans he was incredibly gracious with, and he always wanted to put front and center his teammates and not him. He just had this otherworldly, naturalistic goodness to him, which is why, partly, that the Hobey Baker Award is given to the best collegiate hockey player. Not just for their skill, but also for their sportsmanship and for their decency on the ice, because he invented the post-game handshake.

Kousha Navidar: He invented the post-game handshake for hockey or for every sport? Tell me the story behind that.

Andy: For hockey. He got roughed up pretty badly by the Bostonians, by the Ottowans, by the Montreal players. They knew how good he was. If you're Lionel Messi, then you try and hack down this guy constantly. He was good, and so he got beaten up and attacked on the ice a lot. He would hobble in to the opposing locker room and shake everybody's hands, and it was just him. It was never done before. The NHL credit him with inventing the post-game handshake.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. We talked about his time at Princeton, but he graduates and then he goes on a motorcycle trip around Europe and he finally lives in New York. He's working for J.P. Morgan, but he's disillusioned with his life a little bit. In the podcast, you connect him with the famous lost generation of that time period. How so?

Andy: It's interesting because, yes, he was working for J.P. Morgan. He wasn't working for J.P. Morgan, he was literally working for Julius Pierpont Morgan. He's working in the basement. When he graduates from Princeton, it's one of these classic issues about a great athlete. What do they do after their career is over? He's working in the basement, clipping coupons for wealthy, Gilded Age, high society. He feels trapped. He feels like he's in a cage. His whole life was about flying on the ice, flying through the football field. He was a great hockey player in both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Hockey Hall of Fame.

After he's graduated and his sporting career seems to be at an end, he doesn't know what to do with himself. What he wants to do with himself is join the war. He wants to join the First World War and he actually attempts to enlist after that motorcycle tour in the British Army in London. He's stopped by a Princeton professor, a guy called Augustus Trowbridge, from enlisting in London in 1914. Trowbridge says to him, "Listen, your mentor, Woodrow Wilson," who was his mentor at Princeton, "is now the president, and he's keeping us out of the war." This is one of the things about Hobey, he's zealot-like. He touches upon so many famous people.

1. Scott Fitzgerald, as you've mentioned, Cole Porter in Paris, and this is not what we talk about in the podcast, but the famous dog that saved Hollywood, Rin Tin Tin, lived with Hobey on the airbase in France. He touches across all these different worlds of high society and celebrity at the time.

Kousha Navidar: It is not exactly Forrest Gump, but it is not, not Forrest Gump in some ways there. An important part of this story, I think, is Percy Rivington Pyne, who I'd like to bring in here, because at the same time, as he moves to New York, he becomes roommates with this man, Percy, who's a fellow Princeton alum. He would throw lavish Gatsby-esque parties. The podcast makes a strong case that the relationship was more than just a friendship, that there were romantic hints there. What's that evidence that Hobey and Percy were lovers? Tell us about the impact that it makes in the podcast when you're talking about it.

Andy: Percy Rivington Pyne II is a fabulous character from central casting. He is the scion of Moses Taylor Pyne, who is one of the wealthiest men in America at the time, friends of the Vanderbilts and the Astors and the Goulets and others. Moses Taylor Pyne runs Princeton and bankrolls Princeton and transforms it from a provincial community college to the university that you would recognize today. Percy is a playboy. He loves lavish parties. He creates scenes of Paris for the Astors at a ball in New York. Percy is a golfer. He wins the third NCAA 1899. He's the NCAA golf champion. He just loves giving wonderful parties.

The thing about their relationship, and this is important, it is not circumstantial evidence. When you go through the relationship that they had, when you go through the letters, when you go through the accounts of their relationship, and experts look at that, we brought in a lot of LGBTQ historians to look at the materials that we gathered, clearly, they're in a relationship. Clearly, they are lovers. Clearly, they're deeply affectionate. They lived together in New York. Hobey would share Percy's valet, his butler, and Percy would basically fund all of his lifestyle.

One thing that I really was not fully aware of was that space for same-sex love at that time was much larger than we perceive today. We think that gay relationships have suddenly been accepted, mostly in 2024, but in fact, the real codification of attacks upon homosexuality didn't really kick in until the '20s and '30s. At this time, people didn't really think of themselves as gay or straight. They thought of themselves as men who might love men, who might love women, who might love both. That binary wasn't there in the same way. There was a space and a glass closet that Hobey and Percy lived within.

There have been two fabulous more recent biographies, one by Tim Rappleye and one by Emil Salvini. Even the older biography of the 1960s had lots of questions in the notes about their relationship but it wasn't a time when the author could approach or broach that question. The letters from Percy to Hobey were mysteriously lost on the way back from France. Whereas the other effects that Percy had sent Hobey did come back, but the letters disappeared. We only have the letters from Hobey to Percy, which are letters between lovers. It's not being covered up. It's just America has decided to look the other way, sporting America, because it wasn't a story that fit the narrative of who a masculine sports hero was.

Kousha Navidar: That idea of what a masculine sports hero was, what a hero in general also applies to his service as well. In 1917, you mentioned President Wilson entering into World War I, and Hobey goes into service. I'm looking at the clock here. We got about three minutes left, but I'm just wondering, what does his service look like? How does it fit into the larger narrative of what you're describing here?

Andy: Hobey, by 1916/'17 decides to join a very small group of wealthy people and learn how to fly, because he wants to get into the war. Finally, when America joins the war, he is one of the handful of American pilots sent over. Life expectancy as a World War I pilot was a matter of weeks. We're talking 25 to maybe 30 days life expectancy. This is only 13, 14 years after the Wright brothers' first flight. When he goes up, he's a squadron commander in Toul in northern France. He flies for a number of months, finally, when they get to the front lines. He shoots down three planes. To be an ace, you have to shoot down five planes, but he's credited with three.

He's also known to be a fabulously skillful pilot, just as he was on the hockey rinks and on the football fields. Through the air, he's daring, and he's fabulous. The air war in the First World War was much different to the awfulness of the trenches beneath. It was noble men fighting noble men. Hobey talks about coming across a German pilot that he says, "Was flying a beautiful plane, and he was a beautiful pilot." Then Hobey unloaded the machine gun into that plane. There was honor between these pilots. Hobey's war service is, again, front page news back in America. They talk about this great sports hero, Hobey Baker, who is now a great war hero.

Kousha Navidar: I'm looking at the clock, I want to make sure that we get into all of this. You can go into the podcast to hear the circumstances of his tragic death, his questionable death. We don't have time for it right now. Before we end, I just really want to go back to his legacy. Andy, how do you think the fact that he was queer, should change how we remember his legacy as a historically important athlete?

Andy: I hope that this actually is so validating for queer youth who love hockey or any other sport. At the end of the day, there have been thousands of professional hockey players in the NHL. Not a single one has felt able to come out as gay or bisexual. We know through a lot of research that queer kids playing these games feel very, very frightened, very, very unable to be themselves. The legacy here is that we have discovered that one of the icons of this sport, which is very homophobic and very macho and still very exclusionary, but the icon of this sport was somebody who was a same-sex loving man, a gay, potentially bisexual, but probably gay man.

I think that says to the sport that you should accept that you can have great heroes in your sport that love the sport and you should love them back because right now, the NHL does not create the space for those queer or bisexual or gay youth to play.

Kousha Navidar: If you want to hear more about the story of Hobey Baker, you can check out the three-part 30 for 30 Podcasts, Searching for Hobey Baker. It's out now. We've been talking to Andy Reynolds, who's the executive producer. Andy, thanks for bringing this story to us. I really appreciate it.

Andy: I appreciate it too. Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: That's our show for today. We will be back tomorrow. We are going to be talking to the Pod Save America team about how to be involved with politics and keep your sanity, and we're going to be talking about commencement speeches. A big day for speech giving. We'll see you there tomorrow. Bye-bye.

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