War games

America's first two sports heroes were also soldiers

In the Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt especially sought out Ivy League football players for his Rough Riders. He thought they were the most bully types of all.

The one athlete most identified with the Korean War was Ted Williams, who, though he already had lost three seasons in the heart of his career to World War II, was called back as a Marine fighter pilot and flew 39 missions, many of them as wing to John Glenn.

By contrast, the one athlete most identified with the Vietnam War is Muhammad Ali -- for refusing to serve, of course.

In World War II, the Good War, athletes joined up in proportions comparable to the general young male population. Well over a thousand professional baseball players served, as did more than 600 NFL players. Of the many athletes killed, Nile Kinnick of Iowa, the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner, was the best known.

It was World War I, however, where cruel fate attached itself to two of the most prominent athletes of the early 1900s, precisely the two young men most compared to the paragon, Frank Merriwell, a turn-of-the-century fictional hero celebrated for his exploits on the field, as well as for grace and sportsmanship.

One was Christy Mathewson, the star pitcher of the New York Giants. The other was Hobey Baker, America's first great hockey player and namesake of the award that is now presented to the top U.S. college player.

Mathewson's pitching career -- which included 373 victories -- wound down just before the United States joined the war in 1917, but he was the manager of the Cincinnati Reds then, and even though he was 37 years old, he volunteered and was commissioned a captain. When Mathewson was training in France with live gas in a drill, there was some sort of a panic, he didn't get his gas mask on in time, and he ingested a considerable amount of the poison. He was never really healthy after that, and, his system weakened, he was no match for tuberculosis, which he contracted shortly after the war ended. Mathewson died in 1925, only 45 years old, celebrated then as our most beloved sports hero.

Baker graduated from Princeton in 1914, where he had been a football All-America as well as hockey's eminence. F. Scott Fitzgerald in particular was fascinated by Baker's legend. There was no professional hockey in the U.S. at the time, however, and Baker chafed at working on Wall Street. He missed the action. He missed the game. When the U.S. declared war, he immediately signed up as a pilot and was one of our first fliers in France. Hobey Baker had found a competition again and he reveled in the dogfights in the skies. In a strange way, he was sorry when the war ended. He was losing his skates again.

A few days after the Armistice, Baker went back out to his airfield and asked to take up his plane for a last spin. It rose to a few hundred feet, then plummeted to earth. Ever after, there was always the tale told that Hobey Baker had killed himself rather than face the humdrum world of peace. Probably that's a myth. Whatever, America's great hockey star was ever after known as the last man to die in the Great War.

If it were not, in a way, Christy Mathewson, seven years later.

Our first two All-American sports heroes were both victims of war.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.

 

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