William Nack
This article's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia. (May 2012) |
William Nack | |
---|---|
Horse Racing, Boxing | |
Notable works | Secretariat: The Making of a Champion (1975),
My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life (2004), Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance (2007) |
Spouse | Carolyne Starek |
Children | Emily, Rachel, Amy, William |
William Louis Nack (February 4, 1941 – April 13, 2018)
Early life
Nack was born in
Nack revered the 1955 Kentucky Derby winner, Swaps, more than any human athlete. He encountered Swaps while hanging over the rail at Washington Park, three months after the Derby victory. "The horse I see in memory now looks tall and radiant," he later observed. "Swaps had a large, luminous brown eye, an exquisitely Aegean head and face that looked chiseled in cameo, and a warm, friendly breath that he held for a moment as your offered hand, cupped downward, rose and drew near him." A week later, Nack saw Swaps again at Washington Park, "lunging through the homestretch like a panther in the gloaming, three in front, his powerful shoulders glinting in the light as he reached his forelegs far in front of him and galloped home in hand." Swaps beat Traffic Judge and set a new course record of 1:54 3/5. "The clarity of that performance, the decisive finality that I had yearned for and missed in the world of horse shows ruled by fallible and sometimes idiotic judges, had won me to racing as a sport and to the memory of that horse forever." Eleven days after the American Derby, Swaps lost a Washington Park match race to Nashua. Fourteen-year-old William, watching the race on a fifteen-inch Admiral television set, bolted from his house, ran to his neighbor's yard, and vomited on a tree. A week later, he cut a photo of Swaps out of a magazine and stuck it in his wallet. He kept the photo—which he had laminated in 1965—in a multitude of wallets until 1983, when "the last swatch of genuine leather" got pick-pocketed at Madison Square Garden while Nack was covering a prizefight between Roberto Durán and Davey Moore.[3]
In high school, Nack was a groom at Arlington Park. There he worked for trainer Bill Molter, and the star of the stable was Round Table, the Horse of the Year in 1958. In the tack room behind Round Table's stall, Nack practiced his jockey's crouch on a wooden horse. One day he had a friend strike a stirrup with a screwdriver to simulate the bell signaling the opening of a starting gate. "The next thing I know, Round Table's front hooves are on top of the stall," Nack said. "He heard the clang and he was snorting and rearing, ready to go. I thought I was going to be fired for getting him upset. It was very embarrassing."[4]
Among Nack's most vivid memories of his college days at the
After graduating in 1966, Nack enlisted in the Army, where he was assistant editor of Infantry Magazine at
Career
Nack took his mustering-out pay and moved to
In 1978, Nack joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, which, in 1974, had excerpted his book on Secretariat. Though his main beat was horse racing, he wrote on a variety of subjects. In 1987 alone, his output included lengthy takeouts on heavyweight boxers
At S.I., he wrote profiles of Durán[8] and Sugar Ray Leonard[9] and Sonny Liston,[10] and Lennox Lewis[11] and Larry Holmes[12] and Dempsey,[13] of whose final days as a Broadway restaurateur, he observed: "He greeted and schmoozed and told stories. About riding the rods. About the mining towns. About the day he beat Willard in the roaring Ohio heat. And always the one about the Long Count, under the lights at Soldier Field, and the night he lost but won." Nack's story on the imprisoned middleweight boxer Rubin Carter inspired The Hurricane (1999 film).[14]
Nack's pursuit of reclusive chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer spanned two years.[15] He eventually tracked Fischer down, in 1985, in California. The final months of this search found Nack dressed up like a hobo, gray combed into his hair, loitering around in the Los Angeles public library. He spied Fischer, ducked behind a card catalog, and recalled: "I... leaned my head against the files and said, in a suppressed whisper, 'Oh my God! I found him. I don't believe this. Now what the hell do I do?'"
By the early 1990s, Nack was noticing more and more breakdowns during horse races. His investigation met a wall of silence, until one veterinarian spoke to him off the record: cortisone had become the stables' drug of choice to mask the fatigue of injured horses unfit for racing. Nack exposed the cortisone scandal to the public in his 1993 feature story "The Breaking Point",[16] which told of a filly, So Sly, put down after breaking a leg during a race.
Works
Secretariat: The Making of a Champion
Secretariat, the Big Red Horse, won the 1973 Kentucky Derby 2½ lengths in front in a time of 1:59.4, breaking the track record of 2:00-flat established by Northern Dancer in 1964. With Ron Turcotte aboard, Secretariat ran each quarter-mile faster than the one before. Two weeks later, Secretariat won the Preakness. Three weeks after that, he won the Belmont to secure the Triple Crown. He ran the fastest 1½ miles on dirt in history, 2:24 flat, which sliced more than two seconds off Gallant Man's stakes record.[17] Nack recalls Secretariat as a "chivalrous prince of a colt who was playful and mischievous---he once grabbed my notebook out of my hand with his teeth, when I was talking to his groom, Eddie Sweat---and stayed the same as a stallion at Claiborne. A kid could have ridden him. The older he got, it seemed, the more of a ham he became, and throughout his life he used to stop and pose whenever he heard the click of a camera."[2]
Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend (1999), said: "Secretariat is a radiant book, a love song to one of the most enthralling performers in sports history."[18]
My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life
Nack took readers through his career at the track, the ring and the stadium. He bypassed many of the thrills of the games themselves for the dramas of the people (and animals) who played them. A profile of Secretariat mixed with an account of Hernandez's loneliness, Fischer's ambivalence toward celebrity, and Liston's awareness of the effect his race has on his reputation.[19] "I have seen two of the pieces in this book (on the breakdown of a filly, and the death of Ruffian) move listeners to tears," wrote Roger Ebert. "If you are know a sports fan who is too intelligent for one of those inane NFL picture books, here is the book you need."[20]
Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance
From the 15-length victory in her debut on May 22, 1974, through her win in the Coaching Club American Oaks 13 months later, Ruffian set or tied the track record in all eight stakes races she entered. She had won her 10 starts over all by an average of eight lengths (more than 60 feet); for that matter, she had never even trailed at any pole in any race. "I had never seen a 2-year-old do what she was doing," Nack wrote, and "with an insouciance that bordered on the downright cavalier, moving as she pleased with a restrained grace and power and at velocities rarely seen in animals so young. She was, in my experience, sui generis."[21] In a 1975 match race between Ruffian and Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure at Belmont Park, the licorice-black filly broke down on the backstretch shortly after leaving the starting gate. Nack leaped from a box near the finish line onto the track and began running. All he thought about was getting across the track and the infield to the far side to find out what had happened to Ruffian. "I was in the middle of the track," he said, "when I heard ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom. I looked up and froze. Here came Foolish Pleasure, thundering down the stretch toward the finish. I didn't know whether to go forward or back. I had visions of the newspaper headlines: RUFFIAN BREAKS DOWN, NEWSPAPER REPORTER KILLED." Nack avoided Foolish Pleasure and was one of only two reporters—more than 100 covered the race—to view the injured filly close up.[4] Watching the ministrations to a dying filly, Nack wrote, he began to see not "the old romantic notion, shaped by those summers" in Chicago "and all that reading I had done in college," but "a picture framed by cannon bones and inked in darker and more somber hues."
A
Personal life
Nack could recite from memory poems by
Awards and recognitions
Eclipse Media Awards
Outstanding Magazine Writing
- 1978 - Sports Illustrated
- 1986 - Sports Illustrated
- 1989 - Sports Illustrated
- 1990 - Sports Illustrated
Outstanding News Writing
- 1991 - Sports Illustrated
Outstanding Feature Writing
- 1991 - Sports Illustrated
Writing - Feature/Enterprise
- 2003 - Gentleman's Quarterly
Thoroughbred Charities of America
- 2003 - Alfred G. Vanderbilt Lifetime Achievement Award
Boxing Writers' Association of America
- 2004 - A.J. Liebling Award
PEN American Center
References
- ^ "Sports Illustrated Writer William Nack Dies" - 04.14.18 - Sports Illustrated
- ^ The Blood-Horse magazine. April 17, 2006. Archived from the originalon June 23, 2006. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ ISBN 1-933060-30-1
- ^ a b "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on November 18, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on November 27, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert". blogs.suntimes.com. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on November 19, 2013. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on October 15, 2013. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on March 30, 2013. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on April 13, 2014. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on April 25, 2014. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on October 26, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ Lidz, Franz (April 30, 2010). "At the Kentucky Derby, Running for Roses, Not Speed Records - WSJ". online.wsj.com. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ISBN 9780306811333. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ISBN 0306812509.
- ^ "The Twelve Gifts of Christmas | Roger Ebert's Journal | Roger Ebert". blogs.suntimes.com. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ Banks, Eric (June 3, 2007). "The New York Times". nytimes.com. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ Banks, Eric (June 3, 2007). "The New York Times". nytimes.com. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ Ebert, Roger (October 17, 2010). "The storyteller and the stallion".
- ^ Ebert, Roger (December 8, 2008). "Perform a concert in words".
- ^ "CNN Sports provided by Bleacher Report - CNN.com". sportsillustrated.cnn.com. Archived from the original on November 27, 2012. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "The 29th Annual Emmy Awards for Sports" (PDF). March 19, 2008. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "Festival Special Guests: Roger Ebert's Film Festival". ebertfest.com. Retrieved January 1, 2015.
- ^ "2017 PEN America Literary Awards Winners - PEN America". PEN America. March 27, 2017. Retrieved August 2, 2017.