Sports Biblio Digest, 4.15.18: Remembering Bill Nack

News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture

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This is Digest issue No. 120, published April 15, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website. To view this newsletter in a browser, click here.

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As the formal obituaries were written, a flurry of remembrances began pouring in Saturday for Bill Nack, the legendary sportswriter, horse racing scribe and chronicler of Secretariat, one of that sport’s greatest icons.

Nack was 77 when he died of cancer Friday in Washington, D.C., and the tributes came from those who knew him at mainstream publications, including Newsday, Sports Illustrated and ESPN, as well as the horse racing press.

The author of two books on horse racing and an anthology of his best sportswriting, Nack is best known for his 1990 Sports Illustrated story, “Pure Heart,” written after the death of Secretariat:

“I remember wishing that those days could breeze on forever—the mornings over coffee and doughnuts at the truck outside the barn, the hours spent watching the red colt walk to the track and gallop once around, the days absorbing the rhythms of the life around the horse. I had been following racehorses since I was 12, back in the days of Native Dancer, and now I was an observer on an odyssey, a quest for the Triple Crown. It had been 25 years since Citation had won racing’s Holy Grail. But for me the adventure really began in the early morning of March 14, when Laurin lifted Turcotte aboard Secretariat and said, ‘Let him roll, Ronnie.’ ”

Although he covered many sports and began his career “cityside” at daily newspapers, the erudite Nack gravitated to sports, and began as Newsday’s horse racing writer in 1972. At the same time, a two-year-old Secretariat began turning heads in the months leading up to the following year’s Triple Crown races.

Then Nack was mainly a deadline writer. But his Newsday story about Secretariat’s record 31-length win at the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years carried much of the trademark background reporting that illuminated his magazine work. Setting the scene at shortly before 4 a.m., as the beast and his trainers began their day, Nack fleshed out the real story, what happened leading up to the start of the race:

“It was time to ride in the horse race of his life; a time to whip and beat all the horses, and to do it with the ease of breaking sticks.”

“Pure Heart,” written 17 years later, has been dissected so often, but at Nieman Storyboard Don Van Natta Jr. got to the heart of its greatness:

“To hell with being unbiased or detached; this is a narrator rooting like a madman for a thoroughbred that belongs as much to him as to every $2 bettor. If Secretariat wins, Nack wins, too, though it isn’t cash at the betting windows. No, he wins a great story. A writer knows: Nothing is more valuable than a great story belonging only to you.”

As Nack later explained, he was initially skeptical of how he was asked to write the classic lead paragraph for the story, suggested by an editor very late in the editing process. Yet he admitted that he was never prouder of a story than “Pure Heart.”

Nack’s 2004 book, “Secretariat: Making of a Champion,” later became a Disney motion picture starring Diane Lane and John Lithgow.

As Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden recalled Saturday, Nack didn’t flinch from what was ailing the sport he loved so much:

“He saw the ugliness. In 1992, He wrote an investigative story for SI about the epidemic of thoroughbred breakdowns at American racetracks, and the connection to using painkilling injections, a battle that is still being fought today. That story got Nack shunned at racetracks across the country. He didn’t care. The story was more important than access.”

Two years after Secretariat’s glory came the heartbreak of Ruffian, a filly running in a match race against Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure and who broke down. His 2007 ESPN book, “Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance,” didn’t skirt that ugliness.

During his 25-year run in sports, Nack wrote about other pursuits, but nothing transfixed him more than the horses:

“I’d much rather be around the horses. There was something about their eyes, something about their whole aspect, the way they carried themselves. There was a regalness about them that appealed to me. They had been ridden by kings and queens."

“I started covering horse racing at Newsday in March of ’72. I came on the track about three months after an unraced, untested two-year-old came on the track, Secretariat. We came in at exactly the same time.

“I was an untested turf writer and he was an untested racehorse, and he turned out to be the greatest racehorse that ever lived. And I got really lucky, and you can’t tell me that’s not divinely guided.”

More on Nack and his methods in this interview with Alex Belth of the Bronx Banter Blog.

That Nack switched to sports perplexed those who knew him in a previous life, including Roger Ebert, who was the editor of The Daily Illini at the University of Illinois when Nack was the sports editor:

“It's fair to say that his articles transcended the genre and often qualified as literature -- just as the writings of his heroes Mencken, Liebling and Orwell did. I sat at a reading in the Boulder Book Store once, and he read his article about a filly who broke her leg during a race, and several of his listeners wept. I refer not to a few tears and a sniffle, but to weeping.”

From the introduction to his 2003 collection “My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money and the Sporting Life,” Nack explained his reasons for going to sports, and staying there:

“While most of my colleagues came to sportswriting right out of college, with no detours along the way, I slipped in through the back door of the cityroom, still hearing the wall of police sirens and the thump of gavels on political podiums. I never really left that world, and the stories here entombed more reflect the harsher lights of city streets, of the emergency rooms of the real world, than they do the softer hues that fall like twilight shadows on the playing fields. Not a few of my colleagues, stricken by the pangs of conscience that attend the belief that sports were not worthy of their toils, have fled to the metro or national desks. Alas, having already worked in those asylums, I never suffered that delusion for an instant. Instead, in an odd kind of way, I brought the instincts of the cityroom with me, trying to balance one foot in the ballyard and the other in the world of larger human woes.”

Nack’s eye for great storytelling included being named the guest editor of the 2008 Best American Sports Writing. Series editor Glenn Stout said Saturday the other guest editors who’ve also passed are Dick Schaap, George Plimpton, Frank Deford and Richard Ben Cramer.
Nack also wrote the foreword to “Sometimes They Even Shook Your Hand,” John Schulian’s 2010 anthology. Last year, Nack was given the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. As he concluded in “My Turf:”

“I missed absolutely nothing in that move from cityside. For me, as I hope these pieces suggest, sports turned out to be the whole horse.”