Howard Fendrich, award-winning AP national sports writer and tennis expert, dies at 55‎

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. Fendrich died Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, his wife Rosanna Maietta said. Tennis great Roger Federer, who estimated he'd had more than 100 interactions with Federer over the decades, called the journalist “one of those constant and reassuring presences in the tennis world for many years.”