I’m at 30,000 feet when I get the update, relayed via text message and Wi-Fi, technological wonders that Bob Hammel could not have imagined when he filed stories from Munich, Maui, or Madison Square Garden:

He is ready to go.

I am not surprised. Hammel has been ready, and I know this – have heard it directly – but I’m not ready. If he were across the table during one of a thousand lunches, or in the basement of the Bloomington Herald-Times, where he launched my career, or even in the ICU where he saw me enter the room and threw up into a cup before grinning and saying not to take that response to my arrival personally, he would explain my writer’s dilemma: Get the perspective right. Remove yourself. You’re the storyteller, not the story.

That’s not easy for me when it comes to Bob Hammel.

Another of his lines involved Red Smith, his favorite writer in the sportswriting field in which Hammel was revered: There’s no cheering in the press box.

All those mantras, coming back to me now at altitude, although they were originally offered in that basement office. Show don’t tell. Omit needless words. Hard writing makes easy reading.

Bob Hammel was the hardest-working writer I ever met. That first meeting took place at the urging of Michael Hefron, general manager of the newspaper for which Hammel covered the Olympics and the Rose Bowl, interviewed the likes of Michael Jordan, Ted Williams, and Muhammad Ali, chronicled historic swimming, diving, and track teams, three NCAA men’s basketball championships, and, yes, Bob Knight. That was a more complicated situation than Hammel was ever credited with, and he sought no credit, even when clueless critics used the friendship to diminish his own hard work. He also never returned fire. Those critics are lucky. If he’d been able to take any pleasure in lowering himself into the fray, he’d have incinerated them. He never did.

He applied his highest standards to only himself. That’s challenging, particularly in a business in which passing judgment from a distance is often confused for insight, but Hammel wasn’t that kind of writer or man. He thought deeply, studied with gratitude, mentored with generosity, maintained curiosity. His favorite artists, athletes, and coaches were all of another generation, yet he never patronized the current one, not even at the end. His greatest concerns at that point were for the young and the voiceless, people he feared could be exploited by a “wasn’t it better when…” contingent who understood nothing of Jim Crow or the Marshall Plan, cared nothing about the courage of a Rosa Parks and the hope of a John F. Kennedy, dismissed the genius of a Robert Montgomery Knight.

How dare I conflate so many topics in a single sentence? Because Bob Hammel was a man of nuance. (I promise you they existed, once upon a time.) He had strong opinions but never allowed himself the easy intellectual out. He delighted in debate over his own positions – and changed some of them. Mostly, though, he loved telling stories of other people. Bill Garrett, Indiana’s segregation-breaking basketball star; David Baker, the world-class jazz musician; Bill and Gayle Cook, the entrepreneurs who restored towns when governments couldn’t or wouldn’t; Doc Counsilman, swimming savant; and, of course, Sweet Julie, his wife of 67 years. Readers felt like they knew him. He was a voice in the kitchens and living rooms of thousands. He was gracious to everyone who approached him with comments, although he rarely knew who they were, and indulged their recollections and arguments even though he’d forgotten more about Indiana sports than anyone else ever knew. Actually, that’s both a cliché and incorrect: he never forgot any of it. He corrected me on a game score from 33 years ago in one hospital room conversation, while a blood transfusion settled and monitors beeped at the bedside. I knew he was wrong, but given the circumstances, wasn’t about to debate it. Even Hammel was bound to slip at some point.

Then I went home and checked. A full-court heave had dropped in at the horn, irrelevant to the game but counting in the scorebook. He was right.

Another thing he never forgot: how it could have gone differently for him, a 17-year-old college dropout who found his way to the hometown newspaper in Huntington. Too often, it’s up to the biographer to mention the role of luck and timing in the life of a successful person. I can’t recall a conversation in the last years of Hammel’s life that didn’t detour to the impact of his family, or English teacher (Jennie B. Wilson, who taught him the memorable phrase “gross illiteracies”) or Perry Stewart, Bill Mallory, so many others. He was in awe of his luck and timing.

He was not wrong. He was lucky and timing helped. I owe him that acknowledgment. What he did with that timing, though? That’s hard to put into words. There are the numbers: 17 times he was recognized as the state’s finest sportswriter, five times inducted into a national or international hall of fame, on and on. He didn’t care about statistics. He cared about stories.

Here’s a story: Bob Hammel was a Huntington, Indiana, kid in the 1940’s when his parents invited a Black tenant named Gilbert Carter to stay with them. The experience shaped his politics, which he scrutinized until the end, a relentless student of American history. He despaired over Donald Trump and was exasperated by his own Democratic party but set out to study the Supreme Court rather than settle for complaining. He also despaired over the NIL and open-transfer policy in college athletics, a system that seduces with the dollar and ignores the education, but he rejoiced in a shocking, wonderful 2024 Indiana University football season, and was hopeful for IU basketball under Darian DeVries. The new head coach paid him a visit shortly after his arrival in Bloomington. (I may be the only person who is aware that Coach DeVries made that visit on his 50th birthday. DeVries certainly didn’t mention it. There’s plenty of Bob Hammel’s humility in that choice.)

This meant that Hammel met every IU basketball coach since Everett Dean, whose tenure began in 1924, 101 years ago.

Think about that. Institutional knowledge, redefined. And gone.

Hammel appreciated that DeVries visit but wished he’d asked the coach more questions. A man who spent decades watching a generational icon coach teams that include the nation’s last unbeaten champion wanted nothing more than to pick the brain of the new man on the sideline in Assembly Hall.

Not enough people appreciated how tough he was. Hammel was so kind that you could miss that. He loved sports, yes, but that was only the public surface of a man who quoted Montaigne and Voltaire and had a personal library filled with thousands of books, mostly history. He cherished that library. Having so much knowledge at his fingertips, right in his own home, he told me once, made him a rich man. I can promise you he wasn’t exaggerating his feelings. Last year, he donated that beloved collection to raise money for the Hoosier Hills Food Bank.

His mind was remarkable. The first time I gave him my phone number, he observed that it was easy to remember: you cubed the first digit, then squared two more. As for his work ethic…I’m currently en route to Atlanta, the city where his career ended, and he published six books, including a New York Times-bestseller, after that “retirement.” His last assignment as sports editor was the 1996 Olympics, the fifth Olympics he covered, which is five more than any other reporter from Bloomington had ever covered.

In Munich, in September of 1972, the reporter from the smallest credentialed newspaper at the Olympics got the only exclusive interview with Mark Spitz when seven world records were shattered, seven gold medals won, all while antisemitic terrorists held hostages and patrolled rooftops with rifles. The London Times and LeMonde in Paris were among the newspapers who sent multiple writers, then ran Hammel’s interview because, well, it was the only one.

How did he get it?

He worked harder and cared more. I’ve never known anyone who took more joy in the opportunity to simply do his job. He was so grateful for the work.

Let me also say: he worked smart. He lost his sunglasses early in those Olympics, an absent-minded slip – anyone who knew him will know this was surely true. I once sat with him in a parking space while he complained about the traffic, listening to him gripe that the cars in front weren’t moving, never noticing that they were also empty. While attempting to find the sunglasses in Munich, he realized the security guards would let him pass by to the closed-to-media areas in his quest. He took advantage. The Olympics, Munich, Mark Spitz, seven world records, and one reporter from Bloomington, Indiana, searching for his sunglasses.

How I loved hearing his laugh when he told that story.

Another tale he laughed over: the time he nearly drowned after falling in a fountain outside of an Atlanta hotel at the 2002 NCAA men’s Final Four, the last one Indiana has been to, a championship-game loss to Maryland under Knight’s first successor, Mike Davis. The brush-with-death story was always funnier to Hammel than to me, because it was after nearly drowning that he sent my first novel to an editor who would never have considered it otherwise. Hammel neglected to mention my age. A mere oversight, he pretended.

I was 19. That unsolicited submission gave me a book deal, which sent me to a writing conference in Florida where I met my wife and made life-altering friendships. One writer I met down there was Stephen King, which delighted Hammel, though he’d never read a word of King’s fiction. He admired King’s book On Writing, pleased that King acknowledged Strunk & White, authors of the worn volume Hammel handed me in our first meeting, a guide he considered the pinnacle. Later, afraid his gaps with fiction would hinder his ability to help me, Hammel offered me the King book, which he’d vetted carefully.

“He knows what he’s doing,” he said of the man who was then the world’s best-selling novelist. It seemed like an understatement to me, but didn’t I tell you he cared little for statistics? He was impressed by King’s approach to sentences, how he revised. How hard he worked. Hammel admired talent, but he adored effort. When those intersected – Jordan’s 1984 Olympic performance, say, or the 1976 Hoosiers – he rejoiced.

I’m rambling now. Thinking of thousands of conversations. Of so much red ink spilled from Hammel’s editorial pen on my amateur pages. “It looked like he nicked an artery,” Michael Hefron observed once. He edited even a thank-you note I put on top of those pages. I viewed that as a challenge. I’ve got enough distance now to understand that it was only, and always, generosity.

From the mentorship came the friendship. Of that, I can’t yet begin to articulate my thoughts. Time to log off, the flight attendants tell me. Impossible, because there’s so much more to say. Also appropriate, because there’s a deadline. Nobody ever worked better on a deadline than Bob Hammel.

He is ready to go.

How many times did editors and pressmen wait to hear that line? How many thousands of Indiana families anticipated the result? Bob Hammel gave us the details of the wins and helped us understand the hidden grace in the losses. He was so much more than a sportswriter. He was our storyteller.

We’re descending now. Time to file this one. —30— If you know, you know. Apologies for the cliché, Bob.

No cheers in the press box, no tears on the plane.

He had so many good rules, not always easy to follow.