Bill Nack
| William Nack | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | William Louis Nack February 4, 1941 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Pen name | William Nack, Bill Nack |
| Occupation | Author, Journalist, Film Consultant |
| Genre | Sports, 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 |
Secretariat: The Making of a Champion (1975),
My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life (2004),
William Louis Nack (born February 4, 1941) 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).
William Nack was born in Chicago, 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 gaited saddle horses, including Wing Commander and Bo Jangles. He kept their photos on opposite walls of his bedroom, in memory of their 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."
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 Duran and Davey Moore.
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