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Me bringing a reporter’s notebook to a Lewis Center funeral to record insights and anecdotes might strike some as inappropriate, but journalist Dick Fenlon would have approved. And he was the one in the casket.
Fenlon, who died Sunday at age 91, was first and foremost a wonderful person, but the Columbus native was also importantly the first Dispatch sports columnist to tell it like it was, not how some wanted it to be. The witty wordsmith was a truth-teller paid to be objectively subjective, not a fanboy cheerleading for a team.
“He was never that. He was a real newspaperman,” said celebrated sportswriter Dave Kindred, who during the 1970s wrote for the Louisville Courier-Journal while Fenlon worked for the Louisville Times. (Fenlon also worked for the Ohio State Journal before it folded into the Columbus Citizen-Journal in 1959.)
In other words, Fenlon was a journalist who just happened to write columns. And, oh, how he could write! The graduate of St. Charles Preparatory School and Ohio State celebrated and seared his subjects for Dispatch readers from 1981 until his retirement in 1997.
Describing the crowd roars when Jack Nicklaus won the 1986 Masters, Fenlon took readers among the azaleas: “The sound split the ears. On a day without clouds, all the thunder once found in the sky was at ground level, rolling across the deep green of Augusta National.”
Exquisite. Some days in this business you write. Other days you just type. Fenlon almost always wrote.
Former Dispatch sports writer Mark Znidar described Fenlon in action: “Once behind that laptop he had the look of someone trying to win a game of chess for money.”
What Fenlon wrote depended on the facts, context and magnitude of the moment, as it always should, not on how an athlete, coach or fan base wants to spin it.
Former Dispatch editor Luke Feck hired Fenlon in 1981 as the paper’s first true sports columnist. Until then, most writers served a dual purpose of covering beats while also penning quasi-opinion pieces that often painted a positive picture no matter the circumstances.
Fenlon was different, bringing the heat when needed. His brilliance was in making the poison in his pen taste sweet.
“Softer touch with the needle than a dentist,” former Dispatch reporter Bob Baptist emailed.
But Fenlon always got his message across, and in a radical departure from his predecessors, was not afraid to apply a red-hot poker to Columbus’ No. 1 sacred cow — Ohio State.
Former Dispatch sports columnist Bob Hunter, who stepped in full-time for Fenlon in 1997, wrote of his fellow opinionator on bobhunter.net/blog: “He had the courage to write the truth about Ohio State athletics, even when it was a little messy. Trust me when I say this, this is not easy.”
But it was necessary.
Former Dispatch sports editor Ray Stein observed of Fenlon’s impact on Columbus journalism: “His arrival in 1981 cemented an end to the days when Dispatch reporters who covered the team served as friends-of-the-program ‘yes men’ who accentuated the positive and ignored the rest. … Dick’s role was that of the velvet hammer who nailed home the reality that the sacred cow might be slaughtered, skewered and served for dinner.”
Stein stressed that Fenlon never went looking for trouble, but upon finding it, never backed down.
My time at the Dispatch overlapped with Fenlon’s only two years, but that was long enough to leave three strong impressions. First, Dick understood that sport was important but not so essential as to overwhelm common sense and decency. Second, his columns beautifully stretched normal boundaries, whether that meant mourning the death of his dog or taking readers into places otherwise off-limits to them.
“Some of his most memorable writing was done in 1991 when he covered the Pan American Games in Havana,” former Dispatch assistant sports editor Kirk Arnott emailed. “He covered the games and the athletes, but he also wrote about Cuba and Cubans, which many Americans had only vague notions of.”
Third, I recall Fenlon as a humorist with an impish streak.
Kindred proves my memory accurate.
“Near the end of Adolph Rupp’s time at Kentucky, probably 1971 or 1972, Dick calls me and is laughing,” Kindred began. “He says, ‘Dave, I talked to Adolph Rupp last night.’ And then he told me Rupp answers and says, ‘I know two guys in Lexington, and one is a good guy and one is a son of a bitch. Which one are you?’ And Dick claimed, accurately, to be the good guy. I’ve told that story a million times.”
But never any better than Fenlon would have.
“Dick made the column look easy,” Kindred said.
It never is, even for the best. Hemingway said of stringing words together, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
Fenlon bled 16 years for Dispatch readers. And his sacrifice — a willingness and even obligation to turn the Scarlet and Gray masses red with rage when necessary — should be applauded.
Thanks, Dick. Sad to have to put a final period on it.
roller@dispatch.com
@rollerCD
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