Howard Fendrich, the Associated Press national sportswriter whose relentless reporting and richly detailed prose brought readers inside dozens of Grand Slam tennis finals, record-breaking Olympic moments and harrowing trips down Alpine ski slopes, has died. He was 55 years old.
Fendrich died Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his wife, Rosanna Maita, said. He was diagnosed with cancer in February shortly after returning from Milan, where he covered the XI Olympic Games.
Tennis legend Roger Federer, who estimates he has had more than 100 interactions with Fendrich over the decades, described the journalist as “one of those constant and reassuring presences in the world of tennis for many years.”
“He started covering tennis in 2002, just as the sport was starting to make significant progress, and over time he became part of the fabric of tennis,” Federer said. “Tennis has lost a great journalist and a great person.”
Billie Jean King Posted on social media: “Howard Fendrich was one of the great sports storytellers. He will be missed.”
Fendrich is survived by his wife; His mother, Renee. His brother Alex. Two sons, Stefano and Jordan, both work in sports journalism – just like their father.
“Howard was a gifted journalist who brought such skill, experience and enthusiasm to his work,” said Julie Pace, executive editor and senior vice president of the AP. “His stories were a joy to read, combining lively writing with insightful reporting. He was also a generous and likable colleague whose warmth and passion touched many throughout the Associated Press.”
A graduate of Haverford College near Philadelphia, Fendrich has worked at AP for 33 years, starting as an unpaid intern in Rome.
There, he became fluent in the language of his beloved city, by watching Italian karaoke videos, and this helped him gain access to the news agency’s European sports coverage, with a focus on football. This in turn put him on the radar of the AP Sports Editor at the time, Terry R. Taylor, Who helped him return to the United States.
In the United States, Fendrich began his work 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 area in 2005 and has become a constant presence in the sports beats of the area where he grew up.
But his real passion was tennis. He has chronicled the careers of Venus, Serena Williams, Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and others. He has covered some 70 Grand Slam tournaments over nearly a quarter century. It was in those events that his brilliance shone.
Fendrich’s writing honors included two Grimsley Awards for best overall body of work among AP sportswriters and a handful of Deadline Writing citations. One of them was a piece of Andre Agassi’s last match, which He stated at the US Open in 2006:
“Andre Agassi, no longer a professional tennis player, crouched alone in the silence of the locker room and twisted his torso in an attempt to overcome the seemingly mundane task of pulling a white shirt over his head. Never had Agassi looked so frail in that moment, looking much older than his 36 years.”
The clip caught Fendrich at his best – watching, re-watching, taking notes, going beyond the courts and carefully scrutinizing the details of events witnessed by millions of people to tell them something that the man sitting right next to him might not have noticed.
Fendrich captured the heartfelt encounter between Federer and Bjorn Borg in the hallway after the historic win at Wimbledon. He elaborated Bold facts to play on red clay At Roland Garros, then I had to wash his shorts and socks when the match was over.
On his latest big stint in Milan, he followed speed skater Jota Leerdam’s famous fiancé, fighter Jake Paul, down the hallway to the car park – all just to reveal the details. Just to get a quote. He got them both, and then Paul announced: “Okay, we’re done.” Bodyguards moved in, and, as Fendrich said at a dinner party later, “I decided: Yes, I think we are.”
He had a gift for knowing where to go, who to ask, and, just as importantly, what to ask and how.
For several days during the steamy Washington summer of 2011, he sat in a folding chair on the sidewalk, put a laptop on his lap and wrote, all while waiting for school administrators to emerge from tense negotiations during the NFL’s protracted business lockout. Although he was not what is known today as an “NFL insider,” Fendrich was in charge of the room and the phones — and the sidewalk — and helped the AP remain as competitive as anyone else in providing developments and detailing the eventual conclusion of a standoff.
“There was this insistence,” said Mary Byrne, AP deputy sports editor at the time of the closing. “He was upset about that, and all the time he spent there waiting for people to come out and not saying anything. But that situation wasn’t something he was going to benefit from, and it wasn’t going to beat the story.”
When Washington quarterback Alex Smith broke his leg in the most horrific of fashions in 2018, Fendrich immediately got on the phone with the only person who could understand: retired star quarterback Joe Theismann.
However, sometimes the phone would ring for him, and even if it was in the middle of a World Series game, Fendrich would answer it. If he starts speaking Italian, it is undoubtedly his wife, Rosanna. Or sometimes kids would call and they had a school question — or a story from the soccer game that day. For them, he had endless patience and time.
Then: He went straight back to work, without missing anything.
“Nothing got past him,” said Stephen Wilson, a former European sports editor at the AP, who worked with Fendrich for more than 20 years. “Every story—even a three-paragraph synopsis—should be iron-clad.”
It wasn’t just the written word where Fendrich was a master. He had a quick and sharp sense of humour. No colleague could say no when he raised his eyebrows, cocked his head toward the door and asked them to join him in his “office” — usually a quiet courtyard or hallway off the press room — to rattle off coverage plans for the day or compare notes about people and things seen around the courts.
Chris Lehoritz, an AP editor who has overseen tennis coverage in Europe for decades, spent a long day worrying about punctuation, sentence structure and word choice with Fendrich, who he described as “a perfectionist when it comes to his job.”
Howard was also a friend, and his dry sense of humor, combined with bags of Blue Pop lollipops, made the long days go by quickly, Lehoritz said.
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