William Nack
Encyclopedia
William Nack is an American journalist and author. He wrote about sports, politics and the environment at Newsday
for 11 years before joining the staff of Sports Illustrated
in 1978 as an investigative reporter and general feature writer. Since leaving S.I. in 2001, Nack has freelanced for numerous publications, including GQ and ESPN.com
. He also served as an adviser on the made-for-TV-movie Ruffian
(2007) and the Disney feature Secretariat
(2010).
, Illinois
. His family moved to the village of Skokie
in 1951. As children, William and his sister, Dee, mucked the stables and groomed the neighbors' horses in nearby Morton Grove. In 1955, they got their own charger, a parade horse
with a masking black head atop a pure white body, named The Bandit by Dee. William began riding in horse shows and spent his teenage years with the world's finest gaited saddle horses, including Wing Commander
and Bo Jangles. He kept their photos on opposite walls of his bedroom, in memory of their spectacular final showdown in the International Amphitheatre
in December of that year. In his book Ruffian, Nack wrote that they "went at each other in that hot arena minute by mounting minute and whip over spur, chillingly through the slow gait and the trot, until finally the crowds came bolting to their feet as the mane-flying Commander racked furiously past, his muscular legs pumping him right into history as the greatest five-gaited saddle horse of all time. The howls still sing in my ears."
Young 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
with ease 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 at the hoofs of rival 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, where it reposed in tribute to the exceptional beast. Nack 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 Duran
and Davey Moore.
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."
Among Nack's most vivid memories of his college days at the University of Illinois was the Saturday morning in May 1963 when the great Syracuse University
running back Ernie Davis
died of leukemia. Nack, an assistant sports editor with the Daily Illini
, was alone in the paper's office when the news came across the AP
wire. "I remember how the sadness struck me all of a sudden," said Nack, who later wrote about Davis in S.I. "One day Davis had been this robust, powerful athlete who had so much to give, and then he was gone." While attending Illinois, Nack would descend to the underground stacks of the library to read obscure 19th-century accounts of horse breeds. During his senior year, Nack was sports editor of the Daily Illini under editor-in-chief Roger Ebert
. As a grad student, he became the DIs editor-in-chief.
After graduating in 1966, Nack enlisted in the Army, where he was assistant editor of Infantry Magazine at Fort Benning
in Columbus, GA. before becoming a flack for Gen. William C. Westmoreland. His two-year hitch included a tour in Vietnam
during the Tet offensive of 1968. While stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base
, outside Saigon, he often drowned out the cacophony of exploding mortars and machine gun fire with tapes his mother sent him of the calls of important races. He fondly recalled, “I had left my recorder and tapes under my bed at the Prince Hotel on Tran Hung Dao, and it pleasured me now to imagine some VC colonel lying on his back on my mattress... listening in curious wonder to the call of Damascus winning the Travers by 22.”
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 knowledgeably on a variety of subjects. In 1987 alone his output included lengthy takeouts on heavyweight boxers Mike Tyson
and Leon Spinks
, Jan Kemp
's damage suit against the University of Georgia
, the USFL's lawsuit against the NFL, the New York Mets
' Keith Hernandez
and the Anatoly Karpov
- Gary Kasparov chess championship, as well as turf topics—e.g., jockey Laffit Pincay. During his 23 years at the magazine, he showed an uncanny talent for finding the anecdote that illuminates greater truths about an athlete, such as Rocky Marciano
's paranoid refusal to accept checks. Nack’s love of boxing was stoked by his father, whose interest in the sport dated to Jack Dempsey
.
At S.I., he wrote memorable profiles of Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard
and Sonny Liston
, and Lennox Lewis
and Larry Holmes
and Dempsey, 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)
.
Nack's pursuit of reclusive chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer
spanned two years. 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 finally spied Fischer, ducked behind a card catalog, and pondered his challenge: "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, confirming his suspicions: 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", which told of a filly, So Sly, put down after breaking a leg during a race.
, the Big Red Horse, hit the wire in the 1973 Kentucky Derby 2½ lengths in front, an astonishing message was on the teletimer: 1:59.4, shattering 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, a remarkable accomplishment in that most thoroughbreds run fastest at the beginning of races and gradually slow as they tire. As a measure of speed, strength and endurance, the victory was one of the great performances of the century. Two weeks later Secretariat won the Preakness. Three weeks after that, he slaughtered his competition in the Belmont to secure the Triple Crown. His 31-length romp stands as the ne plus ultra of thoroughbred achievement. "Big Red” ran the fastest 1½ miles on dirt in history, 2:24 flat, which sliced more than two seconds off Gallant Man
’s stakes record. 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, Ed 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."
Red Smith
of the New York Times called the book "the next best thing to watching Secretariat run."
Laura Hillenbrand
, author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend
, raved: "Secretariat is a radiant book, a love song to one of the most enthralling performers in sports history."
are know a sports fan who is too intelligent for one of those inane NFL picture books, here is the book you need."
set or tied the track record in all eight stakes races she entered. She’d won her 10 starts over all by an average of eight lengths (more than 60 feet); for that matter, she’d 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.”
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." Fortunately, Nack avoided Foolish Pleasure and was one of only two reporters—more than 100 covered the race—to view the injured filly close up.
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 New York Times reviewer noted: "Some might scoff at describing the demise of a horse (and all she symbolized) as a tragedy, but Nack’s requiem — for the animal, for his feelings — summons nothing less."
’s novella Pnin
and the final page of F. Scott Fitzgerald
's The Great Gatsby
(in both English and Spanish). Dancing is in his bloodlines. His mother, Elizabeth, danced in the mid-1920s in a troupe that was headed by song-and-dance man Pat Rooney and was billed as the Atlantic City Peach. As with his writing, Nack has a style of dancing that is all his own. "I'll never forget the first time he asked me not to dance," said onetime S.I. writer Demmie Stathoplos, recalling a distant Kentucky Derby press party. "He just took off. He started whirling, leaping and spinning in the air like some mad dervish. About eight bars into the song I was alone on the dance floor, watching Bill and wondering what to do with my hands." Nack has worked as a writer and on-camera host and narrator for the pilot of the TV series Unsettled Scores. The pilot was nominated for an Emmy. He has also written profiles of major sporting figures for ESPN
, serving as on-camera chronicler and host, upon their death. These also run, in expanded form, on ESPN.com. He is married to educator Carolyne Starek and lives with her and Milton, their millennium cat, in Washington, DC.
Outstanding News Writing
Outstanding Feature Writing
Writing - Feature/Enterprise
Newsday
Newsday is a daily American newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties and the New York City borough of Queens on Long Island, although it is sold throughout the New York metropolitan area...
for 11 years before joining the staff of Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
in 1978 as an investigative reporter and general feature writer. Since leaving S.I. in 2001, Nack has freelanced for numerous publications, including GQ and ESPN.com
ESPN.com
ESPN.com is the official website of ESPN and a division of ESPN Inc. Since launching in 1995 as ESPNet.SportsZone.com, the website has developed numerous sections including: Page 2, SportsNation, ESPN 3.com, ESPN Motion, My ESPN, ESPN Sports Travel, ESPN Video Games, ESPN Insider, ESPN.com's...
. He also served as an adviser on the made-for-TV-movie Ruffian
Ruffian (film)
Ruffian is an American made-for-television movie that tells the story of the U.S. Racing Hall of Fame Champion thoroughbred filly Ruffian who went undefeated until her death after breaking down in a nationally televised match race at Belmont Park on July 6, 1975 against the Kentucky Derby winner,...
(2007) and the Disney feature Secretariat
Secretariat (film)
Secretariat is a 2010 biographical film produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Mayhem Pictures, and directed by Randall Wallace. The film chronicles the life of thoroughbred race horse Secretariat, winner of the Triple Crown in 1973...
(2010).
Early life
William Nack was born in ChicagoChicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Illinois
Illinois
Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...
. His family moved to the village of Skokie
Skokie, Illinois
Skokie is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Its name comes from a Native American word for "fire". A Chicago suburb, for many years Skokie promoted itself as "The World's Largest Village". Its population, per the 2000 census, was 63,348...
in 1951. As children, William and his sister, Dee, mucked the stables and groomed the neighbors' horses in nearby Morton Grove. In 1955, they got their own charger, a parade horse
Parade horse
Horses are ridden and driven in actual parades in many different ways. However, a Parade horse refers specifically to a type of horse attired in elaborate, specialized equipment that is more often seen today in specialized competitions and exhibitions than in parades.The "Parade horse" class is a...
with a masking black head atop a pure white body, named The Bandit by Dee. William began riding in horse shows and spent his teenage years with the world's finest gaited saddle horses, including Wing Commander
Wing Commander (horse)
Wing Commander was one of the greatest Saddlebred show horses of the 20th century. In 1948, the chestnut American Saddlebred stallion won his first Five-Gaited World Grand Championship, a title he kept for five years. In total he won 6 Five-Gaited World Grand Championships, the first of only two...
and Bo Jangles. He kept their photos on opposite walls of his bedroom, in memory of their spectacular final showdown in the International Amphitheatre
International Amphitheatre
The International Amphitheatre was an indoor arena, located in Chicago, Illinois, between 1934 and 1999. It was located on the west side of Halsted Street, at 42nd Street, on the city's south side, adjacent to the Union Stock Yards....
in December of that year. In his book Ruffian, Nack wrote that they "went at each other in that hot arena minute by mounting minute and whip over spur, chillingly through the slow gait and the trot, until finally the crowds came bolting to their feet as the mane-flying Commander racked furiously past, his muscular legs pumping him right into history as the greatest five-gaited saddle horse of all time. The howls still sing in my ears."
Young Nack revered the 1955 Kentucky Derby
Kentucky Derby
The Kentucky Derby is a Grade I stakes race for three-year-old Thoroughbred horses, held annually in Louisville, Kentucky, United States on the first Saturday in May, capping the two-week-long Kentucky Derby Festival. The race is one and a quarter mile at Churchill Downs. Colts and geldings carry...
winner, Swaps
Swaps (horse)
Swaps was a California bred American thoroughbred racehorse. He was the son of Khaled, a stallion imported from the Aga Khan's stud in Europe. Swaps goes back to the immortal Man o' War, via his dam, Iron Reward, through the Triple Crown winner, War Admiral. In the list of the top 100 U.S...
more than any human athlete. He encountered Swaps while hanging over the rail at Washington Park
Washington Park
Washington Park was the name given to three major league baseball parks on two different sites in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, located at 3rd St. and 4th Ave. The first two sites were diagonally opposite each other at that intersection...
, 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
Traffic Judge
Traffic Judge was an American Thoroughbred racehorse. He was owned by Clifford Mooers, proprietor of Walnut Springs Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, and trained by future U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee, Woody Stephens...
with ease 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
American Derby
The American Derby is a Thoroughbred horse race in the United States run annually at Arlington Park in Arlington Heights, Illinois. The inaugural American Derby was held at the city's old Washington Park race track and raced there until 1905 when the facility was closed and the track demolished....
, Swaps lost a Washington Park match race at the hoofs of rival Nashua
Nashua (horse)
Nashua was an American-born thoroughbred racehorse, perhaps best remembered for a 1955 match race against the horse that had defeated him in the Kentucky Derby.Nashua's sire was the good, but temperamental, European champion Nasrullah...
. 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, where it reposed in tribute to the exceptional beast. Nack 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
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG and known colloquially as The Garden, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Manhattan and located at 8th Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.Opened on February 11, 1968, it is the...
while Nack was covering a prizefight between Roberto Duran
Roberto Durán
Roberto Durán Samaniego is a retired professional boxer from Panama, widely regarded as one of the greatest boxers of all time. A versatile brawler in the ring, he was nicknamed "Manos de Piedra" during his career....
and Davey Moore.
In high school, Nack was a groom at Arlington Park
Arlington Park
Arlington Park is a horse race track in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois. Horse racing in the Chicago region has been a popular sport since the early days of the city in the 1830s, and at one time Chicago had more horse racing tracks than any other major metropolitan area...
. There he worked for trainer Bill Molter, and the star of the stable was Round Table
Round Table
The Round Table is King Arthur's famed table in the Arthurian legend, around which he and his Knights congregate. As its name suggests, it has no head, implying that everyone who sits there has equal status. The table was first described in 1155 by Wace, who relied on previous depictions of...
, 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."
Among Nack's most vivid memories of his college days at the University of Illinois was the Saturday morning in May 1963 when the great Syracuse University
Syracuse University
Syracuse University is a private research university located in Syracuse, New York, United States. Its roots can be traced back to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1832, which also later founded Genesee College...
running back Ernie Davis
Ernie Davis
Ernest "Ernie" Davis was an American football running back and the first African-American athlete to win the Heisman Trophy. Wearing number 44, Davis competed collegiately for Syracuse University before being drafted by the Washington Redskins, then almost immediately traded to the Cleveland...
died of leukemia. Nack, an assistant sports editor with the Daily Illini
Daily Illini
The Daily Illini, commonly known as the DI, is an independent, student-run newspaper that has been published for the community of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1871...
, was alone in the paper's office when the news came across the AP
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
wire. "I remember how the sadness struck me all of a sudden," said Nack, who later wrote about Davis in S.I. "One day Davis had been this robust, powerful athlete who had so much to give, and then he was gone." While attending Illinois, Nack would descend to the underground stacks of the library to read obscure 19th-century accounts of horse breeds. During his senior year, Nack was sports editor of the Daily Illini under editor-in-chief Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
. As a grad student, he became the DIs editor-in-chief.
After graduating in 1966, Nack enlisted in the Army, where he was assistant editor of Infantry Magazine at Fort Benning
Fort Benning
Fort Benning is a United States Army post located southeast of the city of Columbus in Muscogee and Chattahoochee counties in Georgia and Russell County, Alabama...
in Columbus, GA. before becoming a flack for Gen. William C. Westmoreland. His two-year hitch included a tour in Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
during the Tet offensive of 1968. While stationed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base
Tan Son Nhut Air Base
Tan Son Nhut Air Base was a Republic of Vietnam Air Force facility. It is located near the city of Saigon in southern Vietnam. The United States used it as a major base during the Vietnam War , stationing Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine units there...
, outside Saigon, he often drowned out the cacophony of exploding mortars and machine gun fire with tapes his mother sent him of the calls of important races. He fondly recalled, “I had left my recorder and tapes under my bed at the Prince Hotel on Tran Hung Dao, and it pleasured me now to imagine some VC colonel lying on his back on my mattress... listening in curious wonder to the call of Damascus winning the Travers by 22.”
Career
Nack took his mustering-out pay and moved to Long Island, New York, where he worked as a political and environmental writer for Newsday. During a raucous Christmas party in 1971, he jumped on top of a newsroom desk and recited, chronologically, the names of every Kentucky Derby winner, from the inaugural race in 1875. The editor, a closet horse-player, was so impressed that he asked Nack to cover horse racing for the Sunday paper. Nack accepted. The editor explained that he would have to post the position. All Nack had to do was write a memo stating why he wanted the job. Nack's succinct note said, "After covering politicians for four years, I'd love the chance to cover the whole horse." The following spring, he became the tabloid's official turf writer. During his time on the beat, he witnessed some of the most famous events in thoroughbred racing history, some of which would be included in his books.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 knowledgeably on a variety of subjects. In 1987 alone his output included lengthy takeouts on heavyweight boxers Mike Tyson
Mike Tyson
Michael Gerard "Mike" Tyson is a retired American boxer. Tyson is a former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world and holds the record as the youngest boxer to win the WBC, WBA and IBF world heavyweight titles, he was 20 years, 4 months and 22 days old...
and Leon Spinks
Leon Spinks
Leon Spinks is a former American boxer. He had an overall record of 26 wins, 17 losses and 3 draws as a professional, with 14 knockout wins, and was the former World Boxing Council and World Boxing Association heavyweight champion of the world...
, Jan Kemp
Jan Kemp
Jan Kemp was an American academic and English tutor who exposed the bias in passing college football players and filed a lawsuit against the University of Georgia....
's damage suit against the University of Georgia
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, United States. Founded in 1785, it is the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning and is one of multiple schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States...
, the USFL's lawsuit against the NFL, the New York Mets
New York Mets
The New York Mets are a professional baseball team based in the borough of Queens in New York City, New York. They belong to Major League Baseball's National League East Division. One of baseball's first expansion teams, the Mets were founded in 1962 to replace New York's departed National League...
' Keith Hernandez
Keith Hernandez
Keith Barlow Hernandez is a former Major League Baseball first baseman. He is currently a baseball analyst working for the New York Mets, for whom he played from –, on SportsNet New York and WPIX television broadcasts...
and the Anatoly Karpov
Anatoly Karpov
Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov is a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Champion. He was the official world champion from 1975 to 1985 when he was defeated by Garry Kasparov. He played three matches against Kasparov for the title from 1986 to 1990, before becoming FIDE World Champion once...
- Gary Kasparov chess championship, as well as turf topics—e.g., jockey Laffit Pincay. During his 23 years at the magazine, he showed an uncanny talent for finding the anecdote that illuminates greater truths about an athlete, such as Rocky Marciano
Rocky Marciano
Rocky Marciano , born Rocco Francis Marchegiano, was an American boxer and the heavyweight champion of the world from September 23, 1952, to April 27, 1956. Marciano is the only champion to hold the heavyweight title and go undefeated throughout his career. Marciano defended his title six times...
's paranoid refusal to accept checks. Nack’s love of boxing was stoked by his father, whose interest in the sport dated to Jack Dempsey
Jack Dempsey
William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey was an American boxer who held the world heavyweight title from 1919 to 1926. Dempsey's aggressive style and exceptional punching power made him one of the most popular boxers in history. Many of his fights set financial and attendance records, including the first...
.
At S.I., he wrote memorable profiles of Duran and Sugar Ray Leonard
Sugar Ray Leonard
Sugar Ray Leonard is an American retired professional boxer and occasional actor. He was named Ray Charles Leonard, after his mother's favorite singer, Ray Charles...
and Sonny Liston
Sonny Liston
Charles L. "Sonny" Liston was a professional boxer and ex-convict known for his toughness, punching power, and intimidating appearance who became world heavyweight champion in 1962 by knocking out Floyd Patterson in the first round...
, and Lennox Lewis
Lennox Lewis
Lennox Claudius Lewis, CM, CBE is a retired boxer and the most recent British undisputed world heavyweight champion. He holds dual British and Canadian citizenship...
and Larry Holmes
Larry Holmes
Larry Holmes is a former professional boxer. He grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania, which gave birth to his boxing nickname, The Easton Assassin....
and Dempsey, 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
Rubin Carter
Rubin "Hurricane" Carter fought professionally as a middleweight boxer from 1961 to 1966. In 1966, he was arrested for a triple homicide in the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey...
inspired The Hurricane (1999 film)
The Hurricane (1999 film)
The Hurricane is a 1999 biographical film directed by Norman Jewison, and starring Denzel Washington. The script was adapted by Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon from the books Lazarus and the Hurricane by Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton and The Sixteenth Round by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter.The film...
.
Nack's pursuit of reclusive chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer
Bobby Fischer
Robert James "Bobby" Fischer was an American chess Grandmaster and the 11th World Chess Champion. He is widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time. Fischer was also a best-selling chess author...
spanned two years. 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 finally spied Fischer, ducked behind a card catalog, and pondered his challenge: "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, confirming his suspicions: cortisone
Cortisone
Cortisone is a steroid hormone. It is one of the main hormones released by the adrenal gland in response to stress. In chemical structure, it is a corticosteroid closely related to corticosterone. It is used to treat a variety of ailments and can be administered intravenously, orally,...
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", which told of a filly, So Sly, put down after breaking a leg during a race.
Secretariat: The Making of a Champion
When SecretariatSecretariat (horse)
Secretariat was an American Thoroughbred racehorse, that in 1973 became the first U.S. Triple Crown champion in 25 years, setting new race records in two of the three events in the Series—the Kentucky Derby , and the Belmont Stakes —records that still stand today.Secretariat was sired by Bold...
, the Big Red Horse, hit the wire in the 1973 Kentucky Derby 2½ lengths in front, an astonishing message was on the teletimer: 1:59.4, shattering the track record of 2:00-flat established by Northern Dancer
Northern Dancer
Northern Dancer was a Canadian-bred Thoroughbred racehorse and the most successful sire of the 20th Century. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association calls him "one of the most influential sires in Thoroughbred history"....
in 1964. With Ron Turcotte
Ron Turcotte
Ron Joseph Morel Turcotte, CM is a Hall of Fame thoroughbred race horse jockey best known as the rider of Secretariat, winner of the U.S. Triple Crown in 1973....
aboard, Secretariat ran each quarter-mile faster than the one before, a remarkable accomplishment in that most thoroughbreds run fastest at the beginning of races and gradually slow as they tire. As a measure of speed, strength and endurance, the victory was one of the great performances of the century. Two weeks later Secretariat won the Preakness. Three weeks after that, he slaughtered his competition in the Belmont to secure the Triple Crown. His 31-length romp stands as the ne plus ultra of thoroughbred achievement. "Big Red” ran the fastest 1½ miles on dirt in history, 2:24 flat, which sliced more than two seconds off Gallant Man
Gallant Man
Gallant Man was a thoroughbred racehorse, named for a horse in a Don Ameche movie.- Career at Kentucky Derby:Gallant Man is remembered primarily for his upset loss in the 1957 Kentucky Derby...
’s stakes record. 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, Ed 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."
Red Smith
Red Smith (sportswriter)
For other uses, see: Red Smith Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith was an American sportswriter who rose to become one of America's most widely read sports columnists.-Career:After graduating from Green Bay East High School, site of Packers home games until 1957, Smith moved on to...
of the New York Times called the book "the next best thing to watching Secretariat run."
Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand is an American author of books and magazine articles.Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Hillenbrand spent much of her childhood riding bareback "screaming over the hills" of her father's Sharpsburg, Maryland, farm. A favorite of hers was Come On Seabiscuit, a 1963 kiddie book. "I read...
, author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Seabiscuit: An American Legend is a non-fiction book written by Laura Hillenbrand published in 2001 about the thoroughbred race horse, Seabiscuit. It won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year and was made into a feature film in 2003. It has also been published under the title: Seabiscuit - The...
, raved: "Secretariat is a radiant book, a love song to one of the most enthralling performers in sports history."
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 a determined and nearly human Secretariat mixed easily with an account of Hernandez's loneliness, Fischer's ambivalence toward celebrity, and Liston's poignant awareness of the effect his race has on his reputation, and vice versa. "I have seen two of the pieces in this book (on the breakdown of a filly, and the death of Secretariat) move listeners to tears," wrote Roger Ebert. "If youRuffian: A Racetrack Romance
From the dazzling 15-length victory in her debut on May 22, 1974, through her waltz in the Coaching Club American Oaks 13 months later, RuffianRuffian
A ruffian is a scoundrel, rascal or unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person.As a proper noun, Ruffian may refer to:*Ruffian , a famous thoroughbred filly racehorse*Ruffian , 2007 television movie about the racehorse...
set or tied the track record in all eight stakes races she entered. She’d won her 10 starts over all by an average of eight lengths (more than 60 feet); for that matter, she’d 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.”
In a 1975 match race between Ruffian and Kentucky Derby
Kentucky Derby
The Kentucky Derby is a Grade I stakes race for three-year-old Thoroughbred horses, held annually in Louisville, Kentucky, United States on the first Saturday in May, capping the two-week-long Kentucky Derby Festival. The race is one and a quarter mile at Churchill Downs. Colts and geldings carry...
winner Foolish Pleasure
Foolish Pleasure
Foolish Pleasure is an American bay thoroughbred race horse who was born in Williston, Florida. He was one of the top three three-year-old colts of his time....
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." Fortunately, Nack avoided Foolish Pleasure and was one of only two reporters—more than 100 covered the race—to view the injured filly close up.
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 New York Times reviewer noted: "Some might scoff at describing the demise of a horse (and all she symbolized) as a tragedy, but Nack’s requiem — for the animal, for his feelings — summons nothing less."
Personal life
After a fair libation of bourbon and fine red wine, Nack can recite from memory poems by W.B. Yeats, passages from Vladimir NabokovVladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
’s novella Pnin
Pnin
Pnin is Vladimir Nabokov's 13th novel and his fourth written in English; it was published in 1957.-Plot summary:The book's eponymous protagonist, Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, is a Russian-born professor living in the United States...
and the final page of F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
's The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....
(in both English and Spanish). Dancing is in his bloodlines. His mother, Elizabeth, danced in the mid-1920s in a troupe that was headed by song-and-dance man Pat Rooney and was billed as the Atlantic City Peach. As with his writing, Nack has a style of dancing that is all his own. "I'll never forget the first time he asked me not to dance," said onetime S.I. writer Demmie Stathoplos, recalling a distant Kentucky Derby press party. "He just took off. He started whirling, leaping and spinning in the air like some mad dervish. About eight bars into the song I was alone on the dance floor, watching Bill and wondering what to do with my hands." Nack has worked as a writer and on-camera host and narrator for the pilot of the TV series Unsettled Scores. The pilot was nominated for an Emmy. He has also written profiles of major sporting figures for ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
, serving as on-camera chronicler and host, upon their death. These also run, in expanded form, on ESPN.com. He is married to educator Carolyne Starek and lives with her and Milton, their millennium cat, in Washington, DC.
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