1. William Louis Nack was an American journalist and author.
25 Facts About William Nack
1. 2.
William Nack wrote on 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.
3.
William Nack served as an adviser on the made-for-TV-movie Ruffian and the Disney feature Secretariat.
4.
William Nack's family moved to the village of Skokie, in 1951.
5.
William Nack began riding in horse shows and spent his teenage years with gaited saddle horses, including Wing Commander and Bo Jangles.
6.
William Nack revered the 1955 Kentucky Derby winner, Swaps, more than any human athlete.
7.
William Nack encountered Swaps while hanging over the rail at Washington Park, three months after the Derby victory.
8.
Fourteen-year-old William Nack, 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.
9.
In high school, William Nack was a groom at Arlington Park.
10.
William Nack took his mustering-out pay and moved to Long Island, New York, where he worked as a political and environmental writer for Newsday.
11.
The editor, a closet horseplayer, asked William Nack to cover horse racing for the Sunday paper.
12.
All William Nack had to do was write a memo stating why he wanted the job.
13.
In 1978, William Nack joined the staff of Sports Illustrated, which, in 1974, had excerpted his book on Secretariat.
14.
William Nack eventually tracked Fischer down, in 1985, in California.
15.
The final months of this search found William Nack dressed up like a hobo, gray combed into his hair, loitering around in the Los Angeles public library.
16.
William Nack's 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.
17.
William 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.
18.
William Nack took readers through his career at the track, the ring and the stadium.
19.
William Nack bypassed many of the thrills of the games themselves for the dramas of the people who played them.
20.
William Nack had won her 10 starts over all by an average of eight lengths ; for that matter, she had never even trailed at any pole in any race.
21.
William Nack leaped from a box near the finish line onto the track and began running.
22.
William Nack relished it, savored it, inhaled it, and after memorizing it rolled it on his tongue and spoke it aloud.
23.
William Nack recited to me from Lolita, and Speak, Memory, and Pnin.
24.
William Nack started whirling, leaping and spinning in the air like some mad dervish.
25.
William Nack wrote profiles of major sporting figures for ESPN, serving as an on-camera chronicler and host, upon their death.