My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood Money, and the Sporting Life (2004), William Louis Nack (February 4, 1941 – April 13, 2018)[1] was an American journalist and author.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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 Durán and Davey Moore.

After graduating in 1966, Nack enlisted in the Army, where he was the assistant editor of Infantry Magazine at Fort Benning in Columbus, GA. before becoming a flack for Gen. William C. Westmoreland.

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 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.

During a 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.

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 1987 Anatoly Karpov – Garry Kasparov World Chess Championship, as well as turf topics—e.g., jockey Laffit Pincay.

At S.I., he wrote profiles of Durán[8] and Sugar Ray Leonard[9] and Sonny Liston,[10] and Lennox Lewis[11] and Larry Holmes[12] and Dempsey,[13] of whose final days as a Broadway restaurateur, he observed: "He greeted and schmoozed and told stories.

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.

His 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.

Secretariat, the Big Red Horse, won the 1973 Kentucky Derby 2½ lengths in front in a time of 1:59.4, breaking the track record of 2:00-flat established by Northern Dancer in 1964.

[17] 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, Eddie Sweat---and stayed the same as a stallion at Claiborne.

Laura Hillenbrand, author of Seabiscuit: An American Legend (1999), said: "Secretariat is a radiant book, a love song to one of the most enthralling performers in sports history.

A profile of Secretariat mixed with an account of Hernandez's loneliness, Fischer's ambivalence toward celebrity, and Liston's awareness of the effect his race has on his reputation.

"[20] From the 15-length victory in her debut on May 22, 1974, through her win in the Coaching Club American Oaks 13 months later, Ruffian set or tied the track record in all eight stakes races she entered.

"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.

"[21] 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.

[4] 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.

"[22] Nack could recite from memory poems by W. B. Yeats, passages from Vladimir Nabokov's novella Pnin and, the final page of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (in both English and Spanish).