College sports worlds apart: Hobey Baker and Charlie Baker.

THE NEW COLLEGE FOOTBALL season is in full swing. Under new NCAA rules allowing payments to players in college sports, that means some newly minted millionaires have taken the field in games across the country.   

Most of New England’s small college athletes will miss the new bounty, however, and their colleges will struggle to preserve their amateur missions and cultures. Where should they turn for support?        

How about our former two-term governor? Lifelong sports enthusiast Charlie Baker is now president of the NCAA. 

Baker was a back-up basketball forward at Harvard, which, like all Ivy League schools, shuns athletic scholarships and promotes the amateur ideal. He became president of the NCAA in 2023, and has managed the rapid movement of big-time college athletics from amateur to professional sport.   

As the face of this seismic change in college sport, the person charged with overseeing this transition might seem an unlikely champion of amateurism. But Baker’s background as an amateur athlete and identification with that role may yet drive him to work to preserve the model supported by scores of New England schools.   

And as he looks for inspiration in that quest, Charlie Baker should recall another Baker: Hobart Amory Hare (“Hobey”) Baker, Princeton class of 1914, and the only man elected to both the college football and hockey halls of fame.  

Hobey Baker plunged to earth and died in a stalled fighter plane in France at the end of World War I. He was 26.  

In “A Flame That Burned Too Brightly,” Ron Fimrite of Sports Illustrated wrote that Baker was “in his day and perhaps forever the most romantic figure in all of sport, an athlete who surpassed even his most daring feats with the sheer magic of his person.”  

More than a century later, Hobey remains the beau-idéal of the amateur sportsman, a species endangered by the NCAA’s budding plans for play for pay. What does Hobey Baker have to say to Charlie Baker in these days of change?   

Hobey starred in football and hockey at Princeton from 1910 to 1914. Football games at that time were defensive struggles, filled with punts and daring returns that Hobey raised to an art form. He was known as well for his manners off the field as for his brilliance on the field and ice.   

Fimrite wrote that Hobey “imposed a code of behavior on athletes, particularly college athletes, that was accepted, if not faithfully observed, for the better part of four decades.”  

Be modest in victory. Be generous in defeat. Give all credit to your teammates. Play by the rules. Never boast. Be cool and implacable, always.   

One author called him the ideal “gentleman-sportsman, the gifted amateur in the English tradition he so admired.” Fimrite quoted long-time Boston Herald and Boston Globe columnist George Frazier, who wrote in 1962 of Hobey and Princeton: “He haunts a whole school, and from generation unto generation. You say ‘Hobey Baker’ and all of a sudden you see the gallantry of a world long since gone.”  

F. Scott Fitzgerald fictionalized Baker as the Princeton football captain “Allenby” in his debut novel, This Side of Paradise.  

Hobey Baker and his like were amateur athletes according to the standards of the early 20th century. Their brilliant blend of amateur status, athletic excellence, and national acclaim appeared again in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, where Jesse Owens of Ohio State won four gold medals and by his example loudly refuted Nazi propaganda about a “master race.”   

Fifty years later, David Halberstam captured the essence of the same spirit in The Amateurs, a story of collegiate rowers bound for the Olympics in 1984.  

Halberstam wrote that legendary Harvard and Olympic crew coach Harry Parker “sensed why it was that [his oarsmen] were amateurs, why they gave so much in a society that gave back so little reward. For his men, rowing was as much theology as sport; it was built entirely on faith. The oarsman’s self-esteem and membership in this elite circle depended completely on what he did; if he worked hard enough, he would be rewarded.” 

Charlie Baker knows the lore of amateur sports. His college classmates rowed for Harry Parker. He played hoops for Harvard in Princeton’s gym, steps away from Hobey Baker Rink.  

If Charlie Baker channels Hobey Baker, he may find the inspiration to preserve a sphere of amateurism — let’s call it the Hobey Baker Division — where sports remain subordinate to the academic mission, and where wealth and consumerism are not part of the curriculum for athlete or spectator.  

Early signs of Charlie Baker’s impulses are encouraging. Appearing last fall on the podcast “Hot Topics,” hosted by the Division III Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, Baker recalled how much he enjoyed watching his two sons play Division III football at Union and Denison. He spoke about the special intimacy and camaraderie of sports and academics at that level. 

“Chances are that you know most of your classmates and they know you,” he said. “And there are no bad seats at a D3 game,” he joked.   

Charlie Baker has opposed the classification of student-athletes as “employees,” citing the burdens such a classification would impose on Division II and III schools, and the “active opposition of their leadership at all levels opposing this.”   

He could also draw inspiration from another high-profile sports executive: A. Bartlett Giamatti, president and professor of English at Yale University and later commissioner of Major League Baseball. In his book Take Time for Paradise, Giamatti meditated on the meaning of sports in our country and the virtues of such recreation for spectator and athlete alike. He wrote: 

“Much of what we love later in a sport is what it recalls to us about ourselves at our earliest. And those memories, now smoothed and bending away from us in the interior of ourselves, are not simply of childhood or a childhood game. They are memories of our best hopes. They are memories of a time when all that would be better was before us, as a hope, and the hope was fastened to a game.” 

Thirty-five years after Giamatti wrote, sports retain a powerful grip on the young. Giamatti’s belief that the wellspring of such love — hope fastened to a game — seems to hold true today, even as the tide of amateurism ebbs.  

In these times of change, the question Hobey Baker might ask Charlie Baker is: Can hope be fastened to college games for play and pay? 

Thomas A. Barnico teaches at Boston College Law School. He is the author of a novel, War College, set in the Vietnam War era.