Blue White Illustrated

H ISTO R Y A little-known Lion great was, for a brief while, Gotham's reigning sports hero NEW YORK MINUTE Y | ou may not believe this, but a Penn State football and baseball player is the only man in history to play on both an NFL and World Series championship team.* Not only that, but he was part of two of the most fabled sports franchises in America when they cele- brated the first of their many champi- onship seasons, and his teammates included two of the greatest athletes of the 20th century: Jim Thorpe and Babe Ruth. In fact, in the mid-1920s, Hinkey Haines was the toast of the New York sports world, acknowledged as the first superstar of the New York Giants foot- ball team after leading the franchise to its first NFL title in 1927 and honored in a celebrity-packed Times Square testimonial dinner. Haines is one of my favorite Penn State historical sports figures, yet he is virtually unknown to present-day Nittany Lion fans. He was a football, baseball and basketball standout for Penn State from the fall of 1919 through the spring of 1921 when the Lions were setting records for undefeated streaks in football and baseball. He might have been a track star, too, be- cause he could outrun everyone on the track team, but his football and baseball coach, Hugo Bezdek, would not allow him to compete in track meets. His formal name was Henry Luther Haines, but everyone called him by his nickname, Hinkey, the source of which is unknown. He was the oldest of five children and a native of Red Lion, Pa. His father, Harry, was mayor during the 1920s, and from 1931 to '43 he served five terms as congressman from that York County district. Actually, Haines only attended Penn State for his junior and senior years but he became one of the school's most popular athletes. He started col- lege at Lebanon Valley, where he com- peted in four sports but left two years later to volunteer for World War I. Upon his discharge as a second lieutenant, he enrolled at Penn State. Bezdek's teams of that era were loaded with talent, and that is one reason Haines never became a first-team All- American in football. He stood only 5- foot-8, 170 pounds, but he was an outstanding breakaway runner, and Bezdek couldn't keep him out of the lineup. He shared time at halfback with both Glenn Killinger and Charlie Way but was overshadowed by his con- temporaries. Walter Camp selected Killinger and Way to his first-team All- America squads, while the best Haines could achieve was Camp's second team in 1920. Those were the teams, from 1919 to '22, that put together a 30- game unbeaten streak, a school record that remained unsurpassed until Joe Paterno's teams of 1967 to '70 went 31 games without a loss. However, baseball was considered Haines' best sport, and he seemed headed for a major league career. He was the center fielder and cleanup * Deion Sanders also played on two NFL championship teams – San Francisco (1994) and Dallas (1996) – but his Atlanta Braves baseball team lost the 1992 World Series to Toronto. hitter on the 1920 and '21 teams (and captain in 1921) that won a school- record 31 consecutive games. Haines' speed made him a superb fielder. There's an account of a game at West Point in 1920 in which Haines report- edly "pulled down a fly ball from among the branches of a tree on the outskirts of the diamond." The coach of the Army team, Hans Lobert, who had played in the major leagues from 1904 to '17, told sportswriters he had "never seen a catch equal to it in any league." Haines was also an outgoing and popular campus leader and he loved to play the piano. When one of the student football managers organized an orchestra for various social events, he asked Haines to be the substitute pianist. That group was the forerunner of the soon-to-be-world-famous Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. After graduating in 1921 with a degree in commerce and finance, Haines served a short stint as "athletics coach" at Lebanon Valley. But a tryout with the New York Yankees led to a contract, and he spent 1921 and 1922 with farm teams before making the major league roster in 1923. Meanwhile, he also was playing professional football, which at the time was struggling to gain the attention of a public that was more interested in college football and professional baseball. Pro football had been in existence since the late 1890s in the form of in- dependent teams and loosely organized leagues. In 1920, 14 teams, primarily from Ohio and Illinois, participated in the American Professional Football As- sociation. Two years later, the associ- ation changed its name to the National Football League. Haines did not belong

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