Books by William Nack
My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, And The Sporting Life
by William Nack
William Nack is widely acknowledged as one of the finest sports writers of the past half-century. He has won the prestigious Eclipse Award, given annually for the best magazine piece on horseracing, an unprecedented six times. Laura Hillenbrand, best-selling author of Seabiscuit, recently called his acclaimed biography Secretariat the "gold standard" of horse books. But Nack's "turf" goes far beyond the racetrack. In this, his first collection, Nack's finest horse racing journalism is coupled with his legendary, one-of-a-kind profiles of athletes from Sonny Liston to Formula One driver Alex Zanardi, Rocky Marciano to Rick Pitino, and Keith Hernandez to Willie Shoemaker. And that is not all. From his compelling history of Yankee Stadium, to his inspiring account of Bob Kalsu, the only professional American athlete to die in Vietnam, to his poignant portrait of Cincinnati Reds catcher Willard Hershberger, who, at fifteen, discovered his father dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and later committed suicide himself, Nack serves up riveting stories of people and places. He also uncovers some of the dirtiest secrets in sports from the shady world of hit men and greedy owners who hire them to kill their horses for insurance payoffs to weightlifting muscle men, who, while stoked up on steroids, have gone on murderous rampages. Whether writing about famous athletes-human and equine-or weighing in on some of the most controversial events and personalities in sports, William Nack has few equals.
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The Best American Sports Writing 2008
In this exciting new collection, William Nack, veteran sportswriter and author of the classic Secretariat, honors the year’s finest sports journalism and thus upholds the tradition that began seventeen years ago, with David Halberstam at the helm. In these pages, you will find the most provocative, compelling, tragic, and triumphant moments in sports from 2007, captured by the knights of the keyboard who make sports come alive for us day after day, week after week, year after year.
Here you’ll find Paul Solotaroff’s excellent and uncompromising take on the neglect that a growing number of crippled NFL players continually face from the NFL players’ union. Jeanne Marie Laskas’s “G-L-O-R-Y!” offers a rousing inside look at the pregame rituals of the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders. A riveting online diary by Wright Thompson reveals a bleak and merciless landscape in China, which that country’s government would rather not have the world see during preparations for the Olympics.
Nack finds a place for the fascinating offbeat story as well as the sensational. Alongside Eli Saslow’s captivating article about an obscure seventeenth-century sport, similar to a giant rugby scrum, carried out in the streets of Kirkwall, Scotland, stands Franz Lidz’s “scoop of the year,” a controversial and rare look into the life of George Steinbrenner, baseball’s largest but recently most enigmatic figure.
This year’s collection marks another wonderful addition to “one of the most consistently satisfying titles in the Best American series” (Booklist).
Contributors include Scott Price, Rick Bragg, Gary Smith, J.R. Moehringer, and others.
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Secretariat
by William Nack
“Secretariat is an elegantly crafted, exhilarating tale of speed and power, grace and greatness, told with such immediacy that the reader is lost in the rush of horses and the clatter and ring of the grandstand.”
—Laura Hillenbrand, bestselling author of Seabiscuit
Updated with a new preface by the author
In 1973, Secretariat, the greatest champion in horse-racing history, won the Triple Crown. The only horse to ever grace the covers of Time, Newsweek, and Sports Illustrated in the same week, he also still holds the record for the fastest times in both the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes. He was also the only non-human chosen as one of ESPN’s “50 Greatest Athletes of the Century.” The tale of “Big Red” is an enduring and inspiring classic, more than thirty years after its initial publication.
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