Mark Montieth: Sportswriter Bob Hammel wasn’t a paragon of objectivity, but he remained true to his kind nature

BLOOMINGTON—The worst thing a sportswriter can be called, at least within the profession, is a “homer.” It’s a pejorative attached to those who are cheerleaders for the teams they cover, who close their eyes and notebooks when confronted by negatives and exaggerate the positives.

Time was, nearly everyone who made a living writing about sports for a newspaper fit that description.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Washington Post reporters who brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974 over the Watergate scandal, had impact throughout newsrooms, even in the “toy departments” where the writers of sports worked. It became honorable to challenge power brokers in all realms.

Bob Hammel might qualify as the biggest homer of all sportswriters in Indiana, if not beyond, during his 30 years as sports editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times (which was named the Daily Herald-Telephone the year his tenure started). But here’s the catch: He also was one of the most respected because of his talent, work ethic and basic decency. He was certainly the most decorated, having won countless awards and inducted into multiple halls of fame for his work.

The product of an idyllic, small-town Midwestern childhood, he came of age in the 1950s. He grew into a sportswriter as Walt Disney would have imagined—always pleasant, always positive. Hammel’s 88 years of life were celebrated on Sunday, when a memorial was conducted in his honor in Bloomington. A gathering of about 150 people attended the service, which lasted one hour and 50 minutes. Eight people stood and spoke of his character, talent, inquisitive mind and generous nature.

“Someone who treated everyone with a level of kindness I wish more people would emulate,” said IU Athletic Director Scott Dolson, a former student manager for the university’s basketball team.

“Smartest man I ever met,” said Rex Kirts, Hammel’s longtime colleague at the Herald-Telephone. “A really kind individual.”

Friendly and forgiving

The non-Hammel name brought up most often during the service was, of course, Bob Knight. Hammel had been working as the H-T sports editor for five years when Knight arrived in 1971, and his entrenchment there was one of the greatest breaks of Knight’s coaching career. Hammel worshipped star athletes as a kid and had a built-in respect for the authority figures who coached them. He never became jaded enough as an adult to stray far from that mindset, and Knight benefited massively from having a friendly, forgiving voice, whether in print or in person, throughout his time in Bloomington.

“I always was inclined to like, and to empathize with, coaches I covered, especially some,” Hammel wrote in his memoir, “Last Press Bus Out of Middletown.”

He acknowledged that a journalist becoming friends with a source was “journalism heresy,” but added, “I’ve never been one for bloodless, inviolate, impractical tenets. I had friendships with almost every coach I ever covered.”

His relationship with IU coaches, especially Knight, could be a case study for aspiring journalists exploring the relationship between a reporter and his or her sources. Hammel attended IU for only two semesters before a job offer from his hometown newspaper in Huntington made a college education seem superfluous. It’s impossible to say if a four-year education capped by a journalism degree would have made him more objective, but probably not by much, given his nature.

Besides, absolute objectivity was going to be a dicey proposition for anyone in Hammel’s position. He was both reporter and columnist for a small city’s newspaper, which had him swimming in oily waters from the outset as someone with the conflicting tasks of reporting facts and offering opinions. Challenging the coaches he covered would have made his working conditions far less pleasant and would not have gone down well with the reading public—unless said coaches happened to be failing, in which case negativity would have been applauded. But Hammel wasn’t capable of that, with any coach.

“Being from a small town had a lot to do with it,” he once told me. “I’m not exactly the most militant guy. I treated them the way I expected to be treated. … It was just my nature.”

Although Hammel blanched at being called Knight’s “best friend,” he probably was. Vice versa, too. Hammel’s son, Rick, stated that at the service. Hammel accompanied Knight on recruiting trips, made calls on his behalf to smooth over conflicts and shared endless meals. “They were very close and spent countless hours together,” Rick Hammel said at the service. “Dad didn’t have a better friend than Coach.”

Knight’s youngest son, Pat, recalls sitting on Rick Hammel’s lap to watch “Star Wars” in a Bloomington theater. He saw their relationship firsthand, as a kid hanging around practice and then as a player and assistant coach for his father.

“I just remember Mr. Hammel always being around,” Pat said recently. “He would come in the coaches’ locker room [after practice], and the assistants would finally get to leave and go home to their families, and those two would get in conversation about something and just talk and talk and talk.”

That relationship continued after Knight was fired at IU and moved to Texas to coach at Texas Tech, and even to the bitter end of Knight’s life. After Knight moved back to Bloomington to live out his final days amid the throes of dementia, Hammel was a regular visitor at his home.

“A lot of people quit visiting, because they couldn’t stand to see my dad that way, but he stuck it out to the end, until he died,” Pat said. “The last couple of months, he was pretty much in a coma in a hospital bed in the house, but [Hammel would] still come over after dinner and just be around. He really helped get [Knight’s] mind working. He knew all the stuff my dad loved, especially sports-wise, to get him in conversation.”

Bumps in the road

Thing is, Hammel was a homer for journalists, too, particularly the newbies. He was friendly to all, even those who took a harsher approach to covering teams, encouraged many and counseled those who sought his advice.

My first brush with him came as a senior at IU when I covered Knight’s team in the 1976-1977 season for the Indiana Daily Student. I had introduced myself to Knight and been given the go-ahead to attend practice, so I walked into Assembly Hall one Monday afternoon, textbooks in hand, to watch a preseason workout. As soon as I found a seat on the arena’s west side, Knight called me down.

He asked if there was some [expletive] at the paper by a certain name. I confirmed. He told me, rather rudely I might add, to leave and not come back until we got “this” straightened out. I had no idea what “this” was but collected my books and left. As I walked out the southwest corner of the playing area, I passed Hammel, who was seated alone in a lower bleacher. He rolled his eyes as I passed by, a silent show of support for the kid reporter.

It took nearly a month, but we did, indeed, get “this” straightened out. It turned out the student reporter had erred by reporting that Knight had thrown a foil ashtray against the press box window as a way of illustrating the frustration of an outcome-altering turnover during IU’s football game the previous Saturday. It turned out to be the man sitting next to Knight. Once admission of guilt and apology were accomplished, I was no longer banished from practice. Knight ended the eviction after a Saturday home game by inviting me to stop by his office the following Monday. “Looks like purgatory is about over, Mark,” Hammel said.

Hammel had his own conflict with Knight that season. Sophomore forward Rich Valavicius quit the team in February with just two weeks remaining. The Herald-Telephone ran a non-bylined story headlined, “Valavicius quitting, transferring from IU.” Hammel didn’t write the headline but obviously wrote the story in which Valavicius said he was leaving “because of personal reasons I really don’t want to discuss with anybody.” Valavicius went on to say that he had no hard feelings and that his teammates had been “really good to me.” He offered no comment about Knight other than to say he recruited “class people.”

It was a straightforward article, but Knight was incensed, apparently by the headline most of all. He cut off Hammel and maintained the freeze until early the following season. “It was a very quiet summer,” Hammel recalled with a laugh years later.

Hammel never complained or challenged Knight in such instances. His nature was to let things work themselves out. He also no doubt knew Knight needed him every bit as much as he needed Knight.

Hammel, though, sometimes slipped into public relations mode in his coverage of Knight. When Knight threw the chair across the court in a game against Purdue in February of 1985, Hammel’s articles in the next day’s newspaper read as if constructed by a defense attorney. He didn’t get around to mentioning the thrown chair until the seventh paragraph of his game story. And while many years later he would call Knight’s furniture rearrangement “plain stupid,” he offered no such criticism of it in his column. He downplayed it, asking readers not to compare it to Woody Hayes punching an opposing player on the sideline, and pointed out the chair wasn’t thrown with “propulsion that endangered anyone nor thrown at anyone–for example, an official.”

He added that Knight kept his temper in check more often than people realized, then wondered if fatigue was a factor from having coached the U.S. Olympic team the previous summer. “How much of a toll did the glorious, wonderful summer that Bloomington, the state and the nation enjoyed so much take on the sheer stamina of the man who poured so much into it?”

IU fans appreciated Hammel’s work, but most also seemed to appreciate John Feinstein’s more objective portrayal in the 1986 bestseller “A Season on the Brink.” Some of the scenes depicting Knight’s harsh methods were shocking to the general public, but they served the purpose of completing a portrait Hammel had left incomplete. If he had even tried, he would have been cut off from Knight forever, which also would not have served the readers well.

Hammel, as his son Rick mentioned on Sunday, hung a plaque in his home bearing Shakespeare’s iconic quote, “To Thine Own Self Be True.” He encouraged his children to follow that code, and he led by example. He remained true to his nature to the very end and believed he profited more from his singular degree of access and insight into the IU athletic programs than from exposing every gory detail.

So did his readers, who got to witness a lot even while the writer was looking the other way.•

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Montieth, an Indianapolis native, is a longtime newspaper reporter and freelance writer. He is the author of three books: “Passion Play: Coach Gene Keady and the Purdue Boilermakers,” “Reborn: The Pacers and the Return of Pro Basketball to Indianapolis,” and “Extra Innings: My Life in Baseball,” with former Indianapolis Indians President Max Schumacher.