Former soccer writer Alex Yannis dies at the age of 84
- by Paul Kennedy @pkedit, Dec 16, 2022
Longtime New York Times sportswriter Alex Yannis, the 2009 Colin Jose Media Award recipient from the National Soccer Hall of Fame, died on Wednesday.
AP reported that Yannis died at a residential hospice in New City, New York, of interstitial lung disease. He would have turned 85 on Sunday, the day of the World Cup final between Argentina and France.
The Greek-born joined the Times as a a news assistant on the metro desk in the late 1960s and later became a news assistant in sports.
He chronicled the rise of the NASL's New York Cosmos and Pele and became a staff reporter in 1977 at the Times, where he remained until his retirement in 2004. During the heyday of the Cosmos, they had almost a dozen beat writers assigned to cover the team on a daily basis.
Yannis, who also covered the NHL's New Jersey Devils and golf, is survived by his second wife, the former Guoquin Zhang, whom he married in 1999, and by his son, John. Yannis' first wife, Joan, died in 1998.
Photo: Howard C. Smith/ISI Photos
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Oh, Shittake...
These things go in 3's.!!!
Hope everyone at SA is Healthy.!!!
Hang in their Guys.!!!
(I still got my Original Copy of Inside Soccer somewhere.???)
RIP ... Good Writer, Job Well Done.
So much good to remember about Alex....including the fact that his name was Yianakopolous and that was too long to have a by-line in single column in the NY Times, so his name came down to Yannis.