University of Wyoming remembers Bob Hammond, longtime Boomerang sports editor

Bob Hammond helped define how Albany County readers followed the Cowboys, turning the Laramie Boomerang into a trusted front-row seat on University of Wyoming athletics for more than half a century. The University of Wyoming remembered him June 2 as the sports editor and columnist whose reporting, columns and presence connected Laramie, the campus and Cowboy fans across the state.

Hammond died in December at age 80. Born March 14, 1945, he began at the Boomerang in March 1964 and later earned his University of Wyoming degree in 1974, building a career that stretched across parts of six decades in Laramie.

By the time of his 2006 induction into the University of Wyoming Athletics Hall of Fame, Hammond had been named Wyoming Sportswriter of the Year 14 times and had won 31 individual Pacemaker Awards from the Wyoming Press Association. His Hall of Fame profile says he covered almost 400 Wyoming football games and more than 900 Cowboy basketball games, along with countless women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball and wrestling events.

His reach went well beyond the press box. Hammond served as Wyoming’s state representative to the Heisman Trophy for 21 years and was selected four times for the Football Writers Association’s All-American Committee. He also became the first recipient of the Wyoming High School Coaches Association’s “Contribution to High School Athletics” award, a sign that his influence extended from UW to the high school ranks across the state.

Former UW sports information director Kevin McKinney remembered Hammond as “kind” and “positive,” saying he never seemed to have a mean bone in his body and that his columns were never negative. Former colleague Richard Anderson said Hammond’s influence on the University of Wyoming, Laramie and the state’s sports culture was “enormous” and unlikely to be matched.

Hammond’s place in Wyoming sports history was unusual even by local standards. He was inducted into the Wyoming Sports Hall of Fame in summer 2006 with its Lifetime Achievement Award, and Burns Rodeo Company of Laramie named a bull “Boomer Bob” after him. The same year, the University of Wyoming named him one of seven Hall of Fame inductees alongside six athletes and a baseball team, underscoring how fully a newspaper columnist had become part of Cowboy institutional memory.

That role linked him to another defining voice in Wyoming sports, Larry Birleffi, the “Voice of the Wyoming Cowboys,” who announced UW football and basketball from 1947 to 1986 and died in 2008 at age 90. Hammond later wrote Birleffi’s obituary, a final reminder that both men helped shape how generations in Albany County heard, read and remembered Wyoming athletics.