Hickok Belt
American sports trophy
The S. Rae Hickok Professional Athlete of the Year award, commonly known as the Hickok Belt, is a trophy awarded to the top professional athlete of the year in the United States. First awarded from 1950 to 1976, it was dormant until being revived in 2012. The most recent recipient is 2024 winner Shohei Ohtani.
History
The award was created by Ray and Alan Hickok in honor of their father, Stephen Rae Hickok, who died unexpectedly in December 1945. The elder Hickok had founded the Hickok Jewelry Manufacturing Company of Rochester, New York, which made belts—hence the choice of a belt for the trophy. The first recipient was baseball player Phil Rizzuto, who received the award for 1950 during a charity dinner event in Rochester on January 22, 1951. He narrowly bested golfer Ben Hogan. Rizzuto's belt is now in the collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
News reports indicate that the Hickok family had previously awarded other belts to boxers, independent of the annual athlete of the year award. Examples include the presentation of "a solid gold and jewel-studded championship belt" to Jake LaMotta in June 1949 at the conclusion of a bout at Detroit's Briggs Stadium, and a belt given to a Rochester-area boxer named Mike Conroy in 1927.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3135207. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1976, 2012 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hickok Belt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.