Former award-winning Bloomington Herald-Times sports editor Bob Hammel dies at age 88

BLOOMINGTON — Former Bloomington Herald-Times sports editor Bob Hammel died on Saturday night at the age of 88, his family confirmed to The Herald-Times.

Hammel spent more than four decades chronicling IU athletics — he covered more than 1,000 Indiana football and basketball games — and earned national recognition throughout his time on press row. 

He covered the Hoosiers' trip to the Rose Bowl in 1968, IU swimmer Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals in the 1972 Summer Olympics, 23 NCAA Final Fours and all three of Bob Knight’s national titles. 

Hammel later teamed with Knight to write the famed coach’s biography “Knight: My Story,” which reached No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Hammel’s own memoir, “Last Press Bus out of Middletown,” was published in 2019. 

His first break in the newspaper business came in 1954, when he landed a job for his hometown paper in Huntington at 17 years old, having just finished his freshman year at Indiana University. 

Hammel stayed on as a sports writer and editor for the paper instead of going back to school and liked to joke that he gave more guest lectures to classes than he ever attended. He returned to Bloomington to become the sports editor of The Herald-Times (then the Herald-Telephone) in 1966, following stints with various papers around the state. 

Former Herald-Times sports writer Andy Graham considered himself “tremendously lucky” to have spent 15 years by Hammel's side covering IU basketball and football. Graham's own career spanned three-plus decades after he was hired by Hammel in 1982.

"He wrote a column every day for years in addition to the game coverage, preview stories, features and everything else he did," Graham said. "That was the standard he set, that was just who he was. He did it year after year, decade after decade. I never really met anyone like him."

The HT became known for its sizable sports fronts with Hammel oftentimes contributing four or five stories a day. 

“Kindness, humility, professionalism, he had all those virtues, but what was really galvanizing was his worth ethic and we all just wanted to follow his lead," Graham said.

Former Herald-Times editor Bob Zaltsberg echoed that sentiment. 

"He was the hardest worker I was ever around, he was tireless," Zaltsberg said. "He wanted to make sure the kids who were playing the sports got the coverage they deserved. He would work whatever the hours it took to get that done.”

Zaltsberg, who retired in 2019, started out at the newspaper working for Hammel as a part-time sports reporter. He wouldn’t have worked his way up to the top job at the paper without Hammel showing a little patience for a cub reporter who missed a sizeable portion of the first football game he assigned to cover back in 1976.

“I thought I was going to get fired,” Zaltsberg said. “I was just a really young kid headed out to Cloverdale High School. I got behind a serious traffic accident on my way there and didn't get there until halftime. I was just terrified when I got back, but Bob just laughed it off.”

Hammel would later tease Zaltsberg about it when the two would walk over to the Third Base Lounge for lunch. Zaltsberg has cherished memories of those moments where he would sit across the table from Hammel and listen to him share stories. 

“Bob was one of the kindest and funniest people I ever met,” Zaltsberg said.

Hammel remained a fixture on the beat long after he retired in 1996 — his final assignment was the Summer Olympics that year — and had a seat reserved for him at Memorial Stadium and Assembly Hall until his passing.

The 16-time Indiana Sportswriter of the Year continued contributing guest columns to The Herald-Times in the decades that followed and wrote about Knight’s passing in 2023.

“He was an institution,” IndyStar sports reporter Zach Osterman said. “He was respected all over college basketball. He was an old-school sports writer that just covered everything.” 

Osterman, who has been covering IU athletics since 2007, first met Hammel when he was a student at the university working on a project for one of his journalism courses. He requested an interview with Hammel and the two spoke for more than 90 minutes about his time covering the Hoosiers. 

The former HT sports editor was a willing resource for students and reporters looking for a historical perspective on IU athletics that few people shared.

“Bob always made time,” Osterman said. “He was a historian for everyone.”

Former Herald-Times sports writer Lynn Houser put that encyclopedia-esque knowledge to use when he co-founded the Monroe County Sports Hall of Fame with Grier Werner in 2009. The first call he made was to his former boss.  

"He was my No. 1 draft pick,” Houser said with a laugh. “He was the first person I wanted on the board of directors. He was a member for at least 10 years, I just thought you can’t have a hall of fame without that kind of knowledge.”

Houser got emotional as he talked about the outsized influence Hammel had on his life, from hiring him at the Herald-Times in 1984 to being a calming presence during a handful of harrowing moments on the single-engine Cessna airplane the two periodically traveled on to cover IU basketball games together. 

“He was not just my boss, he was a mentor, a role model and in some ways a father figure even though I had a wonderful father of my own,” Houser said. “He was there for me every day, always over in his messy corner of the HT’s sports department that was overflowing with magazines and books. I don’t know how he functioned, but he had a method to his madness."

Hammel also possessed an understated writing style that resonated with readers, including award-winning novelist Michael Koryta.

“It's a business where many columnists second-guess coaches or GM's or athletes,” Koryta said in an email exchange with the Herald-Times. “He never fell into that ego trap; he just told the story. His style was shaped by a Montaigne quote that he shared with me in our first meeting and quoted without missing a beat in one of our last conversations: ‘I love the simple and the natural. Eloquence prejudices the subject it treats.’"

Koryta developed a lasting friendship with Hammel after landing him as a mentor for an independent study program at North High School. Hammel nurtured Koryta's writing ambitions and helped him land his first publishing deal in 2002 as a 20-year-old sophomore attending Indiana University.

"That was his writing philosophy -- never drawing attention to his own talent, never showing off, always working to make the story easy on the reader," Koryta said. "People who haven't done it may not appreciate just how hard you have to work to create "easy reading." He was the king of clarity, which is the writer's paramount responsibility."

Hammel received the Curt Gowdy Award from the National Basketball Hall of Fame, the Silver Medal Award from the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame for distinguished service and the Bert McGrane Award from the College Football Hall of Fame. 

He’s been inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame (1990), Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame (1997), the IU Athletics Hall of Fame (2008) and the Monroe County Sports Hall of Fame (2015). 

Those accolades are part of the reason Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson referred to Hammel as an “icon” to the Herald-Times. They initially met in 1984, when Dolson was starting out as a student-manager for Knight.

Dolson got a clear sense of Hammel’s impactful presence as he moved up the ladder at his alma mater and heard industry leaders including former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney speak about the journalist in revered tones. 

“Jim got up and started talking about Bob at this major Big Ten dinner with all the schools there,” Dolson said. “He told everyone there’s nobody that’s been more eloquent in his writing and knowledge about the Big Ten than Bob. I was taken aback by that, that’s our Bob Hammel, yet, he’s being talked about on this national level. I was proud that he was Bloomington’s guy.” 

Hammel is survived by his wife, Julie, and two children, Richard and Jane. The family will receive visitors from 1-3 p.m. Sunday, July 27 at The Funeral Chapel (3000 E 3rd St, Bloomington, IN) with a service to follow.

Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Former Bloomington Herald-Times sports editor Bob Hammel dies at age 88