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Robert “Bob” Hammel, an award-winning sports writer who led the Bloomington Herald-Times sports department for 30 years and covered many of the biggest stories in Indiana sports history, has died at age 88.
Hammel, who died Sunday in Bloomington, was closely associated with legendary IU basketball coach Bob Knight, who won all three of his national championships (1976, 1981, 1987) while Hammel was covering the team.
“Indiana Athletics mourns the loss of Bob Hammel, legendary journalist & member of the IU Athletics Hall of Fame,” Indiana University announced Sunday on social media.
During his 52-year journalism career in Indiana, Hammel covered five Olympic Games, 23 NCAA Final Fours and 29 Indiana high school basketball tournament championships. He also authored or co-authored 14 books.
Among those books was “Knight: My Story,” a national best-selling memoir co-written by Knight and Hammel in 2002. He also teamed with Knight on another book, “The Power of Negative Thinking: An Unconventional Approach to Achieving Positive Results,” in 2013.
In addition to basketball, Hammel covered IU swimmer Mark Spitz when Spitz won a record seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics and the IU football team’s trip to the Rose Bowl in 1968.
Hammel won 16 Indiana Sportswriter of the Year awards from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. He was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame and Football Writers Association of America Hall of Fame, among many others.
At his 2020 retirement event, former Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany called Hammel “simply the most important Big Ten writer in the last 50 years.”
Hammel was born Huntington, Indiana in 1936 and spent a year at Indiana University before launching his newspaper career.
He worked at papers in Peru, Fort Wayne, Kokomo and Indianapolis before being hired as sports editor at the Bloomington Herald-Telephone (later Herald-Times) in October 1966. After 30 years as sports editor, he spent another decade at the newspaper writing Sunday op-ed columns. He continued to write after his newspaper retirement, including two books about late Cook Group leader and philanthropist Bill Cook.
Hammel is survived by his wife of 67 years, Julie, and two children, Richard and Jane. Visitation services are scheduled for July 27 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at The Funeral Chapel and Crematory of Powell and Deckard, 3000 E. Third St., in Bloomington. A memorial service will follow at 3 p.m.
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We should bring back the one-class tourney to honor him this year. May he rest in peace.