![]() “Don’t quote me,” Nack recalled him saying, “but this horse will make them all forget Riva Ridge.” Jimmy Gaffney, the exercise rider for Riva Ridge, who had just won that year’s Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, ushered Nack to Secretariat’s stall. Soon appointed Newsday’s horse-racing writer, he met Secretariat, then 2 years old, in the summer of 1972. ![]() “Gee, David, everybody knows Derby winners,” Nack recalled telling Laventhol. The newspaper’s editor, David Laventhol, a horse-racing fan, was impressed and asked why he had such specialized knowledge. But that changed during a Christmas party in 1971, when he stood on a tabletop and recited the names of every Kentucky Derby winner, a list that began with Aristides in 1875. ![]() He was hired by Sports Illustrated after a decade at Newsday, where he had covered politics and the environment in his early years there. Foyt, baseball players Jackie Robinson and Keith Hernandez, and a football player, Bob Kalsu, the only major professional sports athlete to die in the Vietnam War. ![]() His subjects included horses and jockeys boxers Joe Frazier and Rocky Marciano, race car driver A.J. Over nearly a quarter-century at Sports Illustrated, Nack was one of its storytelling stars, along with Frank Deford, Gary Smith, Sally Jenkins, Leigh Montville and Richard Hoffer. ![]()
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