The example

 Word came down over the weekend that Hall of Fame sportswriter Bob Hammel had passed, and if you were in the profession in Indiana -- hell, if you were in the profession anywhere -- you bowed your head and lit a candle, figuratively if not literally. Sportswriters like to fancy themselves hardshell creatures, but this one hit hard.

That's because Bob Hammel was everything you aspired to be, if you were a chronicler of games. He was ... Hammel.

By that I don't just mean he was a prolific writer of surpassing gifts, a man who wrote so fast and so well you wondered how on earth he managed to knock out a gamer, two sidebars and a column in the usually limited time afforded him. I always figured there were two of him. It was a theory.

But of course there was more to Hammel than the impeccable scribe, and it was that part of him that made him such a splendid example to the rest of us. You wished you could write like him, but more than that you wished you could be more like him. With the talent came a genial and giving soul; in all the years I knew him, he never spoke an unkind word I can remember.

He was a newspaperman's newspaperman, oh, you bet. But he was also a profoundly decent human being.

He became most famous, sometimes to his chagrin, as Bob Knight's best friend -- his muse, his sounding board, even his Boswell, the 18th-century writer who became famous for chronicling the life of the eminent man of letters Samuel Johnson.  In so doing he flirted with journalism's third rail, which says you're never to cross the line between observer and active agent. 

Hardly anyone looked down on Hammel for that, however. There was simply too much to respect about the man, and there was also the understanding that a sports editor in Bloomington, In., wasn't going to last long if he focused more on Knight's wild child immaturity than his knowledge of the game and service to Indiana University. 

Plus, Hammel was no pushover. Those of us who worked the gig in Indiana understood that, too.

After a rare spat between him and Knight, for instance, Hammel briefly refused to use Knight's name in his IU basketball stories. The Hammel Ban didn't last long -- he and Knight patched things up fairly quickly, if memory serves -- but while it did, readers of the Herald-Telephone in Bloomington got used to reading quotes from "the Indiana coach."

It was this Bob Hammel, and all the rest of it, that a young John Feinstein got to know when he came to Bloomington to spend a winter with Knight's Hoosiers. It became the runaway bestseller "A Season On The Brink", and it launched Feinstein into the journalistic stratosphere. And along the way, Feinstein was as touched as everyone else by Bob Hammel, and for the same reasons.

From the book:

"The other reason few people disparaged Hammel was Hammel. Not only was his basketball knowledge respected, but he was generally considered a true gentleman in a business often sorely lacking in them. Some hometown writers let their prejudices affect what they write about other teams. Hammel never did that. He wasn't about to attack Knight, but he didn't run around attacking other people unfairly either."

And now he is gone, after a life well and beautifully lived. But the splendid example?

That survives, of course. Always will.