\n<\/p>\n
Howard Fendrich, a national sports writer for The Associated Press whose persistent reporting and detail-rich prose brought readers inside dozens of taut Grand Slam tennis finals, record-breaking Olympic moments and harrowing trips down Alpine ski slopes, has died. He was 55.<\/p>\n
Fendrich died Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his wife Rosanna Maietta said. He was diagnosed with cancer in February shortly after returning from Milan, where he covered his 11th Olympics.<\/p>\n
Tennis great Roger Federer, who estimated he’d had more than 100 interactions with Fendrich over the decades, called the journalist \u201cone of those constant and reassuring presences in the tennis world for many years.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe 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,\u201d Federer said. \u201cTennis lost a wonderful journalist and a great person.\u201d<\/p>\n
Billie Jean King posted on social media<\/a>: \u201cHoward Fendrich was one of the great sports storytellers. He will be missed.\u201d <\/p>\n Fendrich is survived by his wife; his mother, Ren\u00e9e; his brother, Alex; and two sons, Stefano and Jordan, each of whom are pursuing careers in sports journalism \u2014 just like their dad. <\/p>\n \u201cHoward was a gifted journalist who brought such skill, expertise and enthusiasm to his work,\u201d said AP Executive Editor and Senior Vice President Julie Pace. \u201cHis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n A graduate of Haverford College near Philadelphia, Fendrich worked at AP for 33 years, starting as an unpaid intern in Rome.<\/p>\n There, he became fluent in his beloved city\u2019s language, mostly by watching Italian karaoke videos, and that helped him get a foot in the door to the news agency\u2019s European sports coverage, focusing on soccer. That, in turn, landed him on the radar of the AP sports editor at the time, Terry R. Taylor,<\/a> who helped him get back to the United States.<\/p>\n In the U.S., Fendrich started 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 became a steady presence on sports beats in the region where he had grown up.<\/p>\n But his true passion was tennis. He chronicled the careers of Venus and Serena Williams, Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and others. He covered some 70 Grand Slam tournaments over nearly a quarter-century on the beat. It was at those events where his brilliance shone brightest.<\/p>\n Fendrich’s writing honors included two Grimsley Awards for best overall body of work among AP sports writers and a handful of deadline-writing citations. One was for a piece from Andre Agassi\u2019s last match, which came at the 2006 U.S. Open:<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cCrouched 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The passage highlighted Fendrich at his best \u2014 watching, rewatching, taking notes, going beyond the courts and painstakingly sifting through details of events that millions of people witnessed to tell them something the guy sitting right next to him might not have noticed.<\/p>\n Fendrich captured Federer\u2019s heartfelt meeting with Bjorn Borg in the hallway after a history-making win at Wimbledon. He detailed the gritty realities of playing on red clay<\/a> at Roland Garros, then having to wash it out of shorts and socks when the match was over. <\/p>\n At his last big assignment in Milan, he followed speedskater Jutta Leerdam\u2019s famous fiance, fighter Jake Paul, down the hallway leading to the parking lot \u2014 all just to unearth a detail, just to get a quote.<\/a> He got them, then Paul proclaimed: \u201cOK, we\u2019re done.\u201d Bodyguards moved in and, as Fendrich said at a dinner later: \u201cI decided, \u2018Yes, I guess we are.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n He had a knack for knowing where to go, who to ask and, just as importantly, what to ask and how. <\/p>\n For days during the steamy Washington summer in 2011, he sat on a folding chair on a sidewalk, perched a laptop on his lap and wrote, all while waiting for principals to emerge from tense negotiations during the protracted NFL labor lockout. Though he wasn\u2019t what would be known today as an \u201cNFL insider,\u201d Fendrich worked the room, the phones \u2014 and the sidewalk \u2014 and helped AP stay as competitive as anyone in delivering developments and detailing the eventual end of the standoff.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was that doggedness,\u201d said Mary Byrne, the AP\u2019s deputy sports editor at the time of the lockout. \u201cHe 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\u2019t going to get the best of him, and he wasn\u2019t going to get beat on the story.\u201d<\/p>\n When Washington quarterback Alex Smith broke his leg in the most gruesome of fashions in 2018, Fendrich immediately got on the phone with the one person who could understand: retired star quarterback Joe Theismann.<\/p>\n Sometimes, however, the phone would ring for him and, even if he was in the middle of a World Series game, Fendrich would pick up. If he started speaking Italian, it was undoubtedly Rosanna, his wife. Or sometimes the kids called and had a school question \u2014 or a story from that day\u2019s soccer game. For them, he had endless patience and time.<\/p>\n Then: Straight back to work, and he didn\u2019t miss a thing.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing got past him,\u201d said Stephen Wilson, AP’s former European sports editor, who worked with Fendrich for more than 20 years. \u201cEvery story \u2014 even a three-paragraph brief \u2014 had to be iron-clad.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just the written word where Fendrich was a master. He had a snappy, razor-sharp sense of humor. No colleague could turn him down when he raised his eyebrows, motioned his head toward the door and asked them to join him in his \u201coffice\u201d \u2014 usually a quiet courtyard or hallway outside a press room \u2014 to hash out coverage plans for the day or compare notes about people and things seen around the courts. <\/p>\n Chris Lehourites, an editor at AP who guided tennis coverage in Europe for decades, spent many a long day fretting over punctuation, syntax and word choice with Fendrich, whom he called a \u201cperfectionist when it came to his job.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHoward was also a friend,\u201d Lehourites said, \u201cwhose dry humor, along with his bags of Blow Pop lollipops, made long days go by quick.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n AP sports: https:\/\/apnews.com\/sports<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n