Obituary: William Nack

One of the great sportswriters of all time, Bill Nack, who worked for years for Sports Illustrated and best remembered for his work on Secretariat, has died at the age of 77.

Nack, then employed by Newsday,  spent practically 24/7 with the Secretariat crew during the 1972-73 years, and he documented their story in the outstanding Big Red of Meadow Stable, later titled Secretariat:  The Making of a Champion.  The fact few books have tried to tackle the Secretariat story since says it all about Nack's incredible writing skills.

Nack was also celebrated for his writing an obituary of Secretariat in 1990, a few months after the champion died, for SI called "Pure Heart."  It might be the best sports feature ever written.  This was the essay where it was revealed how large Secretariat's heart really was at the time of his death.

Great article.  I had visited Secretariat just 9 or 10 weeks before he passed, so I knew exactly how Nack felt.

More:

Nack was born in Chicago in 1941 and then moved with his family to Skokie, Ill., at the age of 10. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1966 and serving in the army, he moved to New York and worked with Newsday, covering sports, politics, and the environment for 11 years before joining Sports Illustrated, SI.com reported.

Among the many awards Nack won throughout his career were the ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sportswriting in 2017 and the 1992 Walter Haight Award for career excellence in turf writing presented by the National Turf Writers Association. He was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame's Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor in 2010.

Sports Illustrated as an obituary of him up:

William Louis Nack died Friday, at the age of 77, at his home in Washington, D.C., of complications from the cancer that he had been fighting for several years. He is survived by his wife, Carolyne, four children and several grandchildren. Nack was a towering figure in the history of sports journalism, a literary wordsmith and tireless reporter whose distinctive and soaring prose is revered by his peers and generations of younger writers. He stands among the best sportswriters in the history of the genre, and in many ways, among the best writers of any kind. When he stopped typing, he was a giant personality, full of endless good charm, disarmingly well-read and all times, given to entertain.

 The palette upon which Nack painted his most vivid portraits was horse racing, in particular, Secretariat. His story entitled Pure Heart, published in the June 4, 1990 issue of SI, was an emotional remembrance of the horse and the story that was the centerpiece of Nack’s career, Big Red’s run to the Triple Crown in the spring of 1973. Pure Heart, written several months after Secretariat was euthanized, was a passionate remembrance of a transcendent racehorse, but also of a man who had immersed himself in the story, and now found himself counting the passing of years and tasting the familiarity of his own tales.

This Writer

has some great things to say about writer Bill Nack's new book about racing great Ruffian.

I bought the book yesterday, along with Man O'War and The Horse God Built for possible summer reading. Nack's book is very thin, but he's such a great writer, it doesn't matter.

And yes, "Pure Heart" is probably the greatest magazine article of all time. Apparently that essay is in the latest edition of Nack's book about Secretariat.

It is interesting there are few books exclusively about Red. Nack's book, and Raymond Woolfe's coffee table book (first published in 1974 and since reissued a couple of times) covered everything about the champion. There aren't many writers out there who have anything to add of book length about this horse.

The Great Sports Writer

William Nack, who wrote among other books the definitive book on Secretariat, gives his take on horse racing, both currently and in the past.

There is no doubt the 1970s were the pinnacle of the sport. I am very glad I was around then to see all of those great horses, either on television or in person or both.

Nack has a new book on the great filly Ruffian, a book I will get. As he notes in his comments, the death of Barbaro was far less painful to the sport than the death of Ruffian or even Go for Wand. The entire world got to see this wonderful horse try everything in his power to survive, and they also an education about how difficult it is to save even the best horses from the ravages of laminitis. That made the difference.

Ruffian could have possibly been saved today, although her fractures did break the skin. After all, the surgery to repair her leg was a success; it was her coming out of the anesthetic which ended up in her destruction. This day and age she would have been put in a pool until she woke up from surgery.

Nack's obituary of Secretariat, "Pure Heart," which appeared in Sports Illustrated some months after the champion's death, is one of the all-time great articles. I cried my eyes out when I read it, perhaps because I was lucky to see that horse just weeks before he came down with laminitis and had to be put down. I saw him July 31, 1989, only about a month before he got sick.

Here are a couple of comments from Nack about Secretariat:

Loma Rica, CA:
Who do you think was a better two year old, Ruffian or Secretariat?

Nack:
Dear Loma---This is a question that I have been asked many times and I deal with it this way. I think that Ruffian would have given Secretariat a terrible time of it going 5 ½ or six furlongs, as I think she probably would have whipped any two-year-old I’ve ever seen at those distances, but I do not believe that she or any two-year-old I have seen could have whipped Secretariat going a mile (as in the Champagne Stakes) or the 8.5 furlongs of the Laurel Futurity or the Garden State Stakes. His performance in the Laurel Futurity was simply magnificent, a juvenile display for the ages. He won in a laugher by eight lengths in 1:42 4/5s, just a tick off the track record, and no doubt would have crushed the record had Turcotte not folded up on him. I have long held that Ruffian’s wind-sail around Saratoga in the six-furlong Spinaway Stakes was just stupendous, the greatest performance ever by a two-year-old at Saratoga, at least in my time as a turfwriter, more impressive in its own way than Secretariat’s victory in the 1972 Hopeful Stakes, which he marked by a dazzling charge around the far turn that swept him from last to first in the blink of a tornado’s eye.

Yet, as fast as he ran that day, I see him having trouble catching Ruffian off that last turn at the Spa, with her coasting five in front at the quarter pole, ears pricked; in fact, every time I try to see it, she beats him to the wire as he charges to her side.

Alas, Loma, add another quarter mile to this scenario, including one more turn, and the whole thing changes.

I do not believe she could have handled him at any distance as a three-year-old.

And this:

Versailles, KY:
Really enjoyed your talk at Jo-Beth in Lexington the other evening. I was the guy with the copy of Big Red of Meadow Stable. Anyway, in a world of what if's who wins the Ruffian/Foolish Pleasure match, and a Dr. Fager/Secretariat at a flat mile?

Nack: I think she was a faster and better racehorse, but his busy career---against the best and toughest colts of his generation---gave him the edge in the match race. I talked to a lot of trainers about this before the event, and while they thought Ruffian was the greater of the two as a racehorse, most of them thought that he was the one who was going to take the most beating.

I think Secretariat beats Dr. Fager doing anything. Most people don’t realize how truly fast Secretariat was because he became a legend winning at classic distances, but Turcotte always said that Secretariat was the fastest pure running machine he’d ever been on, regardless of distances, and that, in a match race against Dr. Fager, he would run head and head with him until the turn for home and then, with that giant heart pumping Secretariat home, would draw away to win it.

The really great match race is Dr. Fager and Seattle Slew at a flat mile, Belmont Park, 126 pounds each..
How do you see that one?