A hockey legend’s fatal last flight was as mysterious as his close bond with a male roommate

On the morning of Dec. 21, 1918, Capt. Hobey Baker had everything he needed to go home. World War I had been over for six weeks. His orders had arrived and his bags were packed. Then, he asked for one final flight.

Baker, at 26, was already a legend. He was a Princeton hockey and football star, the proverbial golden boy who filled arenas. The guy was even a star in France during the war. He had become a decorated combat pilot, commanding the 141st Aero Squadron and earning the Croix de Guerre.

But the morning he asked for his one last hurrah, something was off. The mechanics and fellow officers urged him not to fly a newly repaired SPAD, a French fighter aircraft that had recently suffered engine trouble. Compounding the danger was “the worst weather imaginable.”

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As an experienced pilot, Baker had to know he was facing extraordinary danger. In sports lore, it recalls the circumstances around Roberto Clemente’s death. He was warned not to get on a troubled aircraft to take supplies to the victims of a Nicaraguan earthquake on Dec. 31, 1972. He went anyway.

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Likewise for Baker.

Moments after takeoff, the engine failed. Baker, like every pilot, was taught about what comes next: put the plane down straight ahead, accept the rough landing and walk away. Baker, among the most skilled pilots around, didn’t do that. The plane crashed and he died.

More than 100 years later, just like Amelia Earhart’s fatal flight, questions linger about his last flight. Was it a tragic accident? Or something else? That uncertainty is fitting, because Baker’s death is as shrouded in mystery as his life.

Baker’s ‘roommate’

For decades, the explanation for Baker’s state of mind was almost too convenient. He had been engaged to Mimi Scott, a glamorous socialite, and reportedly received a letter from her the same day he took his tragic flight, saying she would marry someone else.

It was the proverbial “Dear John” letter, and as such insinuated that Baker had a broken heart, the kind that might drive a man to do something reckless.

However, by many accounts, the relationship with Scott was more social expectation than passion. The great attachment in Baker’s life, if you put all the pieces together, was Percy Rivington Pyne II, a wealthy financier and fellow Princeton man about nine years his senior.

After graduation, Baker moved into Pyne’s Madison Avenue mansion, and the two were popular among New York high society. During this era, it was common for gay men of stature to have a handsome, younger protégé or “roommate” permanently at their side.

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Teammates joked about how Baker dodged female admirers. Pyne, by all accounts, was infatuated.

Then there are the letters. While Baker was stationed in France, he and Pyne exchanged deeply affectionate correspondence. In them, Baker wrote that he was happy in Europe and did not want to go back to the United States.

It’s not hard to see why. In New York, Baker lived under a microscope. Newspapers speculated about his romantic life. Society, of course, expected him to marry a debutante, raise a family and settle into a respectable career. He was stuck in a J.P. Morgan desk job he reportedly hated because executives paraded him before clients like a trophy.

In the air service, that pressure eased. Historians of LGBTQ life in World War I have written about the intense “comradeship” among men who faced death together, a closeness peacetime society might have viewed with suspicion.

But that feeling only went so far. The government was beginning to use psychiatric screening to ferret out what it called “psychiatric perversions.” But on the front lines, among elite pilots who prized courage and loyalty above all, a man like Baker may have found something rare: a place where he was judged by his skill, and where no one was concerned about his sexuality.

Then came the Armistice. Peace meant going back to the dreaded desk job and the expectations of society. For Baker, the end of the war may have meant the end of the only freedom he had known.

Answers to his orientation lost for good

Baker never said publicly that he was gay, and no document has surfaced in which he says so plainly. After his death, many of his personal letters and artifacts reportedly vanished or were carefully curated by family and institutions.

The evidence that might settle the question may be lost for good. We shouldn’t claim certainty where none exists.

What we can do is point to those who have studied his life. ESPN’s “30 for 30″ podcast, “Searching for Hobey Baker,” lays out the evidence and goes on the general assumption that he probably was gay, given the years living with Pyne, those letters, and the dread of returning to a society that demanded conformity.

The same careful logic applies to his death. We cannot say Baker took his own life. Military officials and Baker’s powerful Ivy League friends quickly deemed it an accident, preserving the image of a war hero.

Some have also speculated that years of helmetless football left him with CTE, which can affect mood and impulse control. But the fact is that he was a man ordered home, flew a plane he was warned not to fly, and didn’t adhere to a maneuver that could have saved his life.

The probability that it was intentional is perhaps more than just a possibility, just as the probability that he was gay remains high.

The rink at Princeton is named after him. Pyne is said to have been behind it. We may never know what Baker was thinking in those last seconds of his short but remarkable life. But maybe to honor him, we should keep his story alive, especially for the many LGBTQ athletes in history who also felt immeasurable pain.

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