Howard Fendrich, revered AP sports reporter, dead…
Howard Fendrich, a national sports author for The Associated Press whose persistent reporting and detail-rich prose introduced readers inside dozens of taut Grand Slam tennis finals, record-breaking Olympic moments and harrowing journeys down Alpine ski slopes, has died. He was 55.
Fendrich died Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his spouse Rosanna Maietta said. He was recognized with cancer in February shortly after returning from Milan, where he lined his eleventh Olympics.
Tennis great Roger Federer, who estimated he’d had more than 100 interactions with Fendrich over the a long time, called the journalist “one of those constant and reassuring presences in the tennis world for many years.”
“He started covering tennis in 2002, right around the time I was starting to have my breakthrough in the sport, and over time he truly became part of the fabric of tennis,” Federer said. “Tennis lost a wonderful journalist and a great person.”
Howard Fendrich, a national sports reporter for the Associated Press, has died at age 55. ASSOCIATED PRESS
Fendrich is survived by his spouse; his mom, Renée; his brother, Alex; and two sons, Stefano and Jordan, each of whom are pursuing careers in sports journalism – just like their dad.
“Howard was a gifted journalist who brought such skill, expertise and enthusiasm to his work,” said AP Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Julie Pace. “His stories were a joy to read, combining lively writing with insightful reporting. He was also a generous and beloved colleague whose warmth and passion touched so many across the AP.”
A veteran of AP across three a long time
A graduate of Haverford College close to Philadelphia, Fendrich labored at AP for 33 years, beginning as an unpaid intern in Rome.
There, he turned fluent in his beloved metropolis’s language, principally by watching Italian karaoke videos, and that helped him get a foot in the door to the news company’s European sports coverage, focusing on soccer. That, in flip, landed him on the radar of the AP sports editor at the time, Terry R. Taylor, who helped him get back to the United States.
In the United States, Fendrich began as an editor on the AP sports desk at the New York headquarters, where he also wrote a sports media column. He moved to the Washington space in 2005 and turned a regular presence on sports beats in the area where he had grown up.
But his true ardour was tennis. He chronicled the careers of Venus and Serena Williams, Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and others. He lined some 70 Grand Slam tournaments over almost a quarter century on the beat. It was at those occasions where his brilliance shone brightest.
Fendrich’s writing honors included two Grimsley Awards for best general physique of work among AP sports writers and a handful of deadline-writing citations. One was for a piece from Andre Agassi’s last match, which got here at the 2006 U.S. Open:
“Crouched alone in the silence of the locker room, a pro tennis player no more, a red-eyed Andre Agassi twisted his torso in an attempt to conquer the seemingly mundane task of pulling a white shirt over his head. Never more than at that moment did Agassi seem so vulnerable, looking far older than his 36 years.”
The passage highlighted Fendrich at his best – watching, rewatching, taking notes, going past the courts and painstakingly sifting through particulars of occasions that tens of millions of people witnessed to inform them one thing the man sitting proper next to him won’t have seen.
Fendrich captured Federer’s heartfelt assembly with Bjorn Borg in the hallway after a history-making win at Wimbledon. He detailed the gritty realities of taking part in on purple clay at Roland Garros, then having to wash it out of shorts and socks when the match was over.
Howard Fendrich places on a Teddy Roosevelt head before collaborating in the Presidents race during a Nationals sport in 2006. AP
At his last big project in Milan, he adopted speedskater Jutta Leerdam’s well-known fiancé, fighter Jake Paul, down the hallway main to the car parking zone – all just to unearth a element, just to get a quote. He obtained them, then Paul proclaimed: “OK, we’re done.” Bodyguards moved in and, as Fendrich said at a dinner later: “I decided, ‘Yes, I guess we are.’”
An unerring intuition for how to get the news
He had a knack for figuring out where to go, who to ask and, just as importantly, what to ask and how.
For days during the steamy Washington summer time in 2011, he sat on a folding chair on a sidewalk, perched a laptop computer on his lap and wrote, all while ready for principals to emerge from tense negotiations during the protracted NFL labor lockout. Though he wasn’t what could be identified today as an “NFL insider,” Fendrich labored the room, the telephones — and the sidewalk — and helped AP keep as aggressive as anybody in delivering developments and detailing the eventual end of the standoff.
“There was that doggedness,” said Mary Byrne, the AP’s deputy sports editor at the time of the lockout. “He was annoyed by it, and by all the time he spent out there waiting for people to come out and say nothing. But that situation wasn’t going to get the best of him, and he wasn’t going to get beat on the story.”
When Washington quarterback Alex Smith broke his leg in the most grotesque of fashions in 2018, Fendrich immediately obtained on the cellphone with the one individual who might perceive: retired star quarterback Joe Theismann.
Sometimes, however, the cellphone would ring for him and, even if he was in the center of a World Series sport, Fendrich would choose up. If he began talking Italian, it was undoubtedly Rosanna, his spouse. Or sometimes the youngsters called and had a college query — or a story from that day’s soccer sport. For them, he had countless endurance and time.
Then: Straight back to work, and he didn’t miss a factor.
“Nothing got past him,” said Stephen Wilson, AP’s former European sports editor, who labored with Fendrich for more than 20 years. “Every story — even a three-paragraph brief — had to be iron-clad.”
It wasn’t just the written phrase where Fendrich was a grasp. He had a snappy, razor-sharp sense of humor. No colleague might flip him down when he raised his eyebrows, motioned his head toward the door and requested them to be a part of him in his “office” — normally a quiet courtyard or hallway exterior a press room — to hash out coverage plans for the day or examine notes about people and issues seen around the courts.
Chris Lehourites, an editor at AP who guided tennis coverage in Europe for a long time, spent many a long day fretting over punctuation, syntax and phrase alternative with Fendrich, whom he called a “perfectionist when it came to his job.”
“Howard was also a friend,” Lehourites said, “whose dry humor, along with his bags of Blow Pop lollipops, made long days go by quick.”
Stay up to date with the latest trending topics! Visit our web site daily for the freshest Sports news and content, rigorously curated to keep you informed.
