RIP Martin Fennelly

This is a tough post to make. Martin was a wonderful man and an incredible talent. He passed from a heart attack at the age of 65. One of my favorite people to be around. Martin was funny and smart and self-depricating and...so many words to describe him.

It has been a tough week for The Tampa Tribune family. Earlier Friday morning the longtime high school sports editor Rick Harmon died in hospice care.

 

Never met him, but when I was on the desk in the Tampa area a couple lifetimes ago, a couple writers I really respect spoke very highly of him. RIP

 

Sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing.
I remember him at Missouri many years ago.

 

Huge loss. I shared a lot of press boxes with him and always enjoyed reading his columns. Looked up to him a lot as a young writer.

 

Martin and Rick were both the best and definitely family. I remember covering Tarver-Jones III in 2005 and in our press row, they had an assigned seat for Ring magazine between Martin and I, and I hear this raspy voice "Is someone sitting here?" and I turn around and it was the legendary Bert Sugar. I let Martin know and he proceeded to do his column on how Sugar would score the fight. That's just one part, and a small one, of the Many wonderful items about Martin. When I was in Fort Myers at the News-Press, I got a call from Rick out of the blue, he said "Hey want to meet up for a beer?" He was on his way to Miami from Tampa. OF COURSE.

Just a couple things I remember about them and there are tons more. As far as longtime high school sports editor (or at least the one from 2001 to 2008), I'm not so sure. That clown is still kickin'

 

It's just hard to imagine a world where I won't see Martin still occasionally pop up at a game and shoot the shit with those of us there covering the events.

Being a sports columnist with his talent in a decently mid-sized market gave him a lot of status in those press rooms, but he always seemed far more interested in what the rest of us were doing than whatever he was writing on that we were going to read and love. One of his FB tributes, a former co-worked talked about how he made young writers feel good. He would call them and chat with them about the high school football game they were covering and ask a bunch of questions until he something really unique caught his attention and then he'll say "hmm, that's interesting I might write a column about that" and there he was on a Friday night in his cargo shorts. More times than not he would invte that young reporter out for a beer or a bite after they filed just to talk about what they just saw.

One of kind. I'm really going to miss that guy. He made everything better by just hanging around.

 

Thank you. I needed that.

 

The Sodom and Gomorrah Super Bowl line.

 

I’m sad I never read his work but glad I’ve now been introduced. What a loss to his community. The kind of columnist we all dreamt to be.