Doyel: Bob Knight didn't like many sportswriters. But he trusted Bob Hammel. Why? Spend time with him. I did

Indianapolis Star

30-06-2025

BLOOMINGTON – We're having the most Bob Hammel argument ever, Bob Hammel and me, at the Bloomington rehabilitation center he's called home since entering hospice care last month. Shouldn't even be an argument, because the facts are clear: Bob Hammel, legendary former sports editor in Bloomington — the most decorated, talented and influential sportswriter in state history — is brilliant. Always has been.
Typical Hammel, he doesn't see it that way.
It starts innocently enough, with me telling Bob what I'd learned earlier in the day during a phone call with his son: Bob's age when he began attending IU. His son, Rick Hammel, had been telling me his dad didn't attend kindergarten in Huntington, Ind., and then skipped first grade when his teacher caught him showing other kids how to read — and his second-grade teacher wanted him to skip that grade, too, before Bob's mother put a stop to that. She didn't want her son starting college at age 15.
So he started IU at age 16.
'Brilliant,' I'm telling him.
Hammel objects, giving his older sister, Joy, the praise for his precociousness.
'She taught me how to read when I was really little,' he says. 'She was a great teacher. She made things seem so simple.'
She's not the only reason you learned how to read when you were 3, I tell him.
'Who else did it?' he says.
YOU DID, I say, and yes, I'm shouting at an 88-year-old man in hospice care. But this isn't just any man. It's Bob Hammel, the only sportswriter to win over notoriously disagreeable IU coach Bob Knight, and not by making nice with Knight. Hammel wrote what he thought, always, even when he knew Knight wouldn't like it, like that time in 1977 … well, slow down. We'll get there. Bottom line is, Bob Hammel won over Knight with his work ethic, his sincerity, his fearlessness. A gently tough man, Bob Hammel.
He can handle this argument. He just can't win it.
'You deserve credit,' I'm telling him. 'You went to IU at 16. I rest my case!'
Hammel's smiling at me. He has a card still to play. He's from another generation, this guy. Don't ever play poker with Bob Hammel.
'I'm about to rest my case,' he says. 'I completely flopped at IU.'
Turns out, brilliant Bob Hammel had an academic Achilles: French.
'I'd never taken a foreign language, and it was obvious to me that I was never going to pass French,' he says.
Then came the break that rescued Hammel from humiliation in French, and upgraded the future of sportswriting in Indiana. Howard Houghton, executive editor at the Huntington Herald-Press — where Hammel had done freelance work in high school — contacted him two weeks before the end of his freshman year at IU. This was the spring of 1954, shortly after the Korean War had cooled down but with the Cold War still heating up, and Houghton was breaking some personnel news to Hammel:
The sports editor in Huntington had left for the military.
'Howard Houghton asked me: Would I take it as a summer job?'
Hammel pauses to smile.
'At the end of the summer, nobody said anything to me and I didn't say anything to anybody,' he says. 'I just stayed as sports editor.'
He was 17 years old.
You know how some of us like to say things like, 'Family is everything'? Platitudes, you call those. Nice thoughts. Gives us some moral high ground. Probably not true, if we have to say it.
Bob Hammel doesn't have to say it. His 10-by-12 room at this nursing facility says it for him: Pictures on the wall of his wife of 67 years, Julie. Pictures on the windowsill of his son Rick, a physician in Ohio, and his daughter Jane, a teacher in Bloomington. A picture on the dresser of Michael.
Who's Michael? What's your hurry? We'll get there. Bob's still telling us — but not with words — that family is everything. His life story tells it, like the way I came to meet Bob in January 2015 at an IU basketball game at Assembly Hall, in the media seating in one corner of the arena, sitting next to Bob and to … well, Bob, who is this?
'This is my wife,' he told me. 'Julie.'
That was Bob Hammel, beloved sports editor emeritus, deserving member of the Indiana University Athletics Hall of Fame. He attended IU games, because everyone at IU insisted. Julie came with him.
Bob insisted.
This was Bob Hammel, early in his career at the Bloomington Herald-Telephone, as it was known in those days: Sectioning off a piece of his son Rick's room, turning it into his office. How big was the room? Not very. How large was his love for his family? Infinite. Bob worked so hard, and he missed so much, that he wasn't going to write by himself in the living room or kitchen. Nope, he wrote late into the night in Rick's room.
'I'd fall asleep to the sound of him on his typewriter,' Rick says. 'That was my childhood.'
So were the family vacations, trips a sportswriter in those days couldn't afford the conventional way, so Bob would do it like this: Drive his family to Boston, showing them the history of the battles at Lexington and Concord, and the beauty of the Old North Church and the butterfly collection at Harvard Library. At night while his wife and kids rested at the hotel, Bob would return to Harvard to cover the NCAA swimming championships.
A slower vacation meant a week in the North Carolina Triangle, the big event the family dinner, with the kids getting to pick the place. When it was his turn, Rick turned down all those BBQ and seafood options; he wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken! Jane can still tease him about that. During the day, while the family relaxed at the pool, Bob covered the 1976 U.S. Olympic men's basketball trials.
In those days the Times-Herald, as the Bloomington paper came to be known, had the fiercest little sports section in the country. He'd never say it, and won't even agree with it now when he reads this, but that was Bob Hammel's doing.
Yes, Bob, it was.
Thing is, Bob Hammel was never going to take the job in Bloomington. Seriously, Bloomington? The Herald-Telephone, as it was still called in the late 1960s, was ensnared in a newspaper war with the upstart Bloomington Courier-Tribune, which launched an ominous opening salvo by hiring away the Herald-Telephone's sports editor — who brought most of the staff with him to the Courier-Tribune.
Bloomington Herald-Telephone editor Perry Stewart made a big swing by trying to hire Bob Hammel.
By then Hammel had worked his way up from the papers in Huntington to Peru, Kokomo, Fort Wayne to the Indianapolis News. He told friends he was 'the 10th writer on a 10-person staff' at the News, but he was in the big city, and he was satisfied.
What did he know about the Bloomington Herald-Telephone, in 1966? Only this: That when the IU basketball team had played Notre Dame recently in Fort Wayne, and the Hoosiers beat the Irish 108-102, the Herald-Telephone wasn't even there. Couldn't be bothered to send a writer 175 miles to cover IU basketball against Notre Dame.
'That was the night the Van Arsdale twins scored career highs — 42 points for Dick, and 34 for Tom,' Bob Hammel says from memory, a fact I later check — unnecessarily, as it turns out, because of course he was right. 'The Herald-Telephone didn't travel? I wasn't going there.'
Doyel in 2019: Van Arsdale twins have brotherhood that remains a work of art
But he went for the interview, and within five minutes he'd been offered — and accepted — the job. Perry Stewart had laid it out for him: You will travel with IU, you will attend the Final Four and even the Olympics. And when Bob Hammel attended the first of his five Olympics Games, the Herald-Telephone was the smallest U.S. paper there.
Bob Hammel? He started winning state sportswriter of the year awards — the final tally is 17 — and becoming the only person, ever, to be named president of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, the Football Writers Association of America, and the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. A progressive, aggressive accumulator of talent, he hired Tracy Dodds and Kristin Huckshorn out of IU. Today they are founding members of the Association for Women in Sports Media.
Six years after Hammel arrived in Bloomington, pecking away at stories in his son's bedroom, the Courier-Tribune folded.
Bob Hammel would never agree to this, but it's true: The Herald-Telephone didn't win the newspaper war.
He did.
Bob Knight would've visited Bob Hammel, right here where I'm sitting, if he were still alive.
They stayed closed to the end, Knight and Hammel, with Hammel playing his own small role in urging Knight back to Bloomington after the fired former IU coach's exile to Lubbock, Texas, in 2001.
Others played a role in bringing back Knight, names you know, names that have visited Bob Hammel, right here where I'm sitting. Answering my question — So Bob, who's been here to see you? — he starts naming names. You know these names. But then he stops and asks me not to write that. He doesn't say why, his eyes starting to close because he's getting tired, so I prompt him:
It's too many people, isn't it? You don't want to leave anyone out.
He nods. His eyes pop open.
'I just marvel that each person would take time from their day to spend it with me,' he says. 'I am so grateful.'
Hammel visited Knight to the end of Knight's life in 2023, earning his way into Knight's inner circle by being one of the few people who'd tell him how it was.
'He's honest,' Knight told the Bedford Times-Mail in 2009. 'When Hammel talks, I listen, whether I agree with him or not. I have a tremendous amount of respect for his opinion.'
Hammel was pushing it in 1977, though. The Hoosiers were coming off that perfect season of 1976, and things weren't perfect anymore. Players were getting injured, or transferring. The Hoosiers went 16-11 that year, and missed the NCAA tournament. Hammel wrote what he thought, knowing the phone call was coming.
'If he didn't agree with something, I'd hear about it,' he says. 'And I'd expect it.'
Says Hammel's son, Rick, now: 'One time my dad wrote what he thought, and Knight called him and said, 'I thought we were friends.'
'My dad told him: 'I've got a job to do.''
Bob Knight's name was synonymous with Indiana basketball — but Bob Hammel was synonymous with basketball in Indiana. How much? For more than a decade there was a magazine devoted to basketball in the state. The owner struck a deal with Hammel, asked him to write for it, and gave it this title:
'Bob Hammel's Indiana Basketball Magazine.'
Rick, growing up in the same room where his dad churned out all that copy, once thought he'd become a sportswriter like Dad. But as he got older and realized what that meant, he looked for something easier.
'I was in awe of him,' Rick says. 'I realized journalism was not an area I was going to go into — because I'd never be able to live up to his footsteps. I used to tell him: 'You know, Dad, going into medicine was easy compared to following you!''
We're talking about God, inside Room 209. Bob's pretty sure God was here a few weeks ago.
'One night I had a feeling I was talking to God,' says Bob, whose family has attended United Presbyterian Church of Bloomington since 1967. 'I can't explain it. I didn't see him, but there was just this…'
He pauses.
'Perception.'
Sitting there, wanting to make sure I get this right, I'm asking him: Did you say you were talking to God?
'Or whoever does the accounting,' he says, smiling. 'I told Him I was ready to go. It was profound, I really mean it. I was exhausted in the morning.'
He continues.
'I know how far from a perfect person I was. I'm the kind of Christian who can't conceive of heaven.'
Who could? That's what I'm telling him. Heaven is literally beyond human comprehension.
'I just know this,' Bob says. 'I'm grateful for Perry Stewart. And Howard Houghton. And Bob Knight — he really helped my stature.'
These are the thoughts he has, lying in his bed at a facility Bob Hammel isn't sure he'll leave. Not until ... well.
'It doesn't look very encouraging,' he says, when I ask if he expects to rejoin his wife at their assisted living facility across town.
Bob makes do here with his thoughts, his memories and his books. Wherever he was, whichever event he was covering, he was probably the only sportswriter who showed up in press rooms with a Tom Clancy book to bide the time. Nowadays his novelist of choice is Michael Koryta, an IU alum and New York Times best-seller Hammel has known since Koryta was attending Bloomington North in the late 1990s. Koryta's family lived near one of Hammel's colleagues at the Herald-Tribune, and Koryta's writing gifts were so apparent, a meeting was set up with Hammel. Koryta brought along a school essay for Hammel to critique.
'I put a lot of red on that paper,' Hammel says, chuckling.
Koryta saved it. When he started writing books, he sent them to Bob Hammel to copy edit. He pulled a fast one on Bob in his 2019 novel 'If She Wakes,' putting lead character Tara Buckley into Hammel College in Maine. Today there's a picture of Michael Koryta on the dresser in Room 209.
Koryta and Hammel have much in common, a combination of prodigious talent and prolific output. Koryta has written 23 novels since 2003, but the book on the adjustable table next to Hammel's bed, 'Departure 37,' is written by Scott Carson. When I ask Hammel about Carson — who is he? — he directs me to the inscription. The author has signed the book.
'To Bob—
'The only sentence that matters is on the top of page 389.'
I turn to Page 389. It's the acknowledgements. The sentence at the top says:
'Always, always, Bob Hammel, friend and teacher.'
I turn back to the inscription. It's signed:
Michael
'His science-fiction pseudonym,' Bob tells me, smiling. 'Michael's so talented.'
So are you, I try to tell Bob Hamm—
'I don't know about that,' he says, starting another argument he can't win.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Threads, or on BlueSky and Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar, or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar. Subscribe to the free weekly Doyel on Demand newsletter.