Fendrich, 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, 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.

Tennis great Roger Federer, who estimated he had more than 100 interactions with Fendrich over the decades, 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.”

Fendrich is survived by his wife Rosanna; his mother, Renée; his brother, Alex; and two sons, Stefano and Jordan, each of whom are pursuing careers in sports journalism — just like their father.

“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 decades

A graduate of Haverford College near Philadelphia, Fendrich worked at AP for 33 years, beginning as an unpaid intern in Rome. There, he became fluent in Italian — largely by watching karaoke videos — which helped him break into the news agency’s European sports coverage, focusing on soccer. That experience brought him to the attention of then-AP sports editor Terry R. Taylor, who helped him return to the United States.

In the U.S., Fendrich started as an editor on the AP sports desk in New York, where he also wrote a sports media column. He moved to the Washington area in 2005 and became a steady presence on regional sports beats.

Yet his true passion was tennis. He chronicled the careers of Venus and Serena Williams, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and many others, covering some 70 Grand Slam tournaments over nearly 25 years on the beat. It was at these events that his brilliance shone brightest.

Fendrich’s writing earned two Grimsley Awards for best overall body of work among AP sports writers, along with multiple deadline-writing citations. One citation came for his story on Andre Agassi’s final match 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 captured Fendrich at his best — watching and rewatching, taking meticulous notes, going beyond the obvious and sifting through details of events witnessed by millions to reveal something others might have missed.

He captured Federer’s heartfelt hallway meeting with Bjorn Borg after a history-making Wimbledon win. He described the gritty realities of playing on red clay at Roland Garros, then having to wash the clay out of shorts and socks afterward. At his final major assignment in Milan, he followed fighter Jake Paul — fiancé of speedskater Jutta Leerdam — down a hallway to the parking lot, simply to get one more detail and one more quote. After Paul said, “OK, we’re done,” and bodyguards moved in, Fendrich later joked at dinner: “I decided, ‘Yes, I guess we are.’”

An unerring instinct for how to get the news

Fendrich had a special knack for knowing where to go, whom to ask, what to ask and how to ask it.

During the steamy Washington summer of 2011, he sat on a folding chair on a sidewalk for days, laptop on his lap, waiting for principals to emerge from tense NFL labor lockout negotiations. Though not an “NFL insider” in today’s sense, he worked the room, the phones and the sidewalk, helping AP remain highly competitive on the story.

“There was that doggedness,” said Mary Byrne, AP’s deputy sports editor at the time. “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 suffered a gruesome leg injury in 2018, Fendrich immediately called the one person who could truly understand: retired star quarterback Joe Theismann.

Yet when his own phone rang — even in the middle of a World Series game — he would answer. If he switched to Italian, it was his wife Rosanna. If it was the kids with a school question or a story from their soccer game, he always had time and patience. Then he would return straight to work, never missing a beat.

“Nothing got past him,” said Stephen Wilson, AP’s former European sports editor who worked with Fendrich for more than 20 years. “Every story — even a three-paragraph brief — had to be iron-clad.”

Beyond his writing, Fendrich was known for his snappy, razor-sharp sense of humor. Colleagues rarely turned down his invitation when he raised his eyebrows, tilted his head toward the door and asked them to join him in his “office” — usually a quiet courtyard or hallway outside the press room — to plan coverage or share observations.

Chris Lehourites, an AP editor who guided European tennis coverage for decades, spent countless hours refining punctuation, syntax and word choice 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.”