Connecting the Dots at Baker Rink

2020 Hobey Baker Trophy Winner Pito Walton (P '23)

Every hockey fan is aware of the Hobey Baker Award, bequeathed annually to the NCAA’s premier player since 1981. Although three decades older than its more heralded cousin, the Hobey Baker Trophy is a forgotten gem in the pantheon of college hockey hardware. Awarded annually to the Princeton freshman who best exhibits the characteristics of its namesake, the Hobey Baker Trophy has been around since 1950. Its list of recipients reads like a Who’s Who of the sport, from Canadian hockey royalty—Syl Apps (P ’70), to a Stanley Cup Champion in George Parros (P ’03), to current elite NHL Prospect Max Veronneau (P ’19). The Hobey Baker Trophy has been a harbinger for hockey greatness.

You kind of look back and see who’s won it, to be a part of those guys, and held in the same light, is pretty important,” said Parros. “These are all things that mean something to players when they’re trying to figure out what their hockey careers are going to look like. It was a huge deal for me personally.”

The 2020 recipient is Pito Walton (P ’23), a Lawrenceville School product who was introduced to college hockey at Baker Memorial Rink as a toddler. Walton is a useful starting point to play the Hobey Baker version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” an exercise that takes us all the way back to the Baker era.

Walton’s father Jim was a senior men’s league goalie for the Essex Hunt Club, who often stared down Princeton Hockey Club’s ageless sniper John Cook (P ’63), the 1960 Hobey Trophy winner. Cook and Austin Sullivan (P ’63) actually shared the 1960 award, back in the era when freshmen ineligible to play varsity hockey, had their own team. The Tiger frosh were a juggernaut in 1959-60.

“We were a great team, we only lost one game,” said Cook. “We played the varsity that year, and to their chagrin, tied them 5-5.”

Cook’s older brother Peter (P ’60) was on that humbled Princeton varsity squad, as was captain and scoring star John McBride (P ’60), the 1957 Baker Trophy recipient. McBride will never forget the aura of Hobey when he arrived at Princeton in 1956, a skinny teenager from Chicago.   

“We’d heard of Hobey Baker, for sure,” said McBride, “and went and played in Baker Rink. You walk in the rink and there’s a huge portrait of him. If you didn’t know about him before you came, you certainly did when you went out for your first tryout.”

McBride went on to set several Princeton scoring records (Baker’s teams did not keep official statistics in his era), including an  astounding 54-point season in 1959-60, a Tiger record that held up for 58 years. John Cook racked up 67 career goals, another piece of Princeton bedrock that wasn't shattered until 2019.

McBride’s father Paul (P ’22) never played hockey, but made annual pilgrimages from his Chicago home to Baker Rink to watch his son take a star’s turn for the Tigers. Back when Paul McBride began his freshman year at Princeton, Tiger sports hero Hobey Baker was racking up aerial victories in World War I France. Shortly after his first exam period in December of 1918, McBride and the entire campus was rocked by news that still confounds the Tiger sports community today: the legendary Hobey Baker had perished in a freak plane crash, the proverbial last man to die in World War I.

During his senior year, Paul McBride learned that Princeton would honor their hockey deity by building their own facility on campus, the Hobey Baker Memorial Rink. McBride missed its grand opening in January of 1923, having graduated seven months prior. Paul McBride’s first visit to Baker Rink wasn’t until 1957, the year his son John won the Hobey Baker Trophy.

Baker-to-McBride-to-McBride-to-Cook-to-Walton-to-Walton, six degrees of separation within a century of Tiger hockey.

It’s impossible for Princeton player not to know the legend of Baker, and cannot help but be inspired by the superstar’s long shadow. John Cook frequently thought of Hobey as he commuted from his Kingston home to Baker Rink, passing the Baker family farm on Castle Howard Court en route. John’s father Peter (P ’37), yet another Tiger scoring star from the Cook hockey clan, painted the quintessential Baker portrait with a grant from Hobey’s 1914 classmates.

And now 20-year-old Pito Walton, who watched his first college game as a five-year-old at Baker Rink, is the 81^st Princeton freshman to have his name forever associated with the legend in orange and black. He plays all his home games in front of season ticket holder John Cook.  Cook is impressed with the lad, and thoroughly enjoyed the club’s playoff sweep over Dartmouth this spring.

“I live and die with my Tigers.”