William Nack's Kentucky Derby Memories

William Nack, who passed away earlier this year, is considered one of the greatest horse racing writers of all-time. I am not a huge fan of the sport, nor am I particularly knowledgeable about it, but I respect greatness in any endeavor, so I read with interest an article by Nack in the December 31, 2018 issue of Sports Illustrated. The article is an excerpt from a memoir that Nack was working on before he died and it tells the story of the race that, as the article's subtitle puts it, "inspired his lifelong love of the sport--the 1958 Kentucky Derby."

Nack recalls his uncle Ed Feeney, then a sports photographer for the Chicago Tribune, inviting him to go to the 1958 Kentucky Derby. Nack was just 17 at the time, a horse racing fanatic who had not yet attended the race of his dreams. Nack soaked up every minute of the experience.

A few years earlier, he had memorized the names of every Kentucky Derby winner since the initial 1875 race. In 1971, as Nack describes it, his journalism career was "plodding along as a political writer at Newsday" when that memorized list helped change his life forever. At the newspaper's Christmas party, Nack recited the list and the newspaper's editor, David Laventhol, asked Nack, "Why do you know that?" Nack told him about his love for the Kentucky Derby and his trip to the 1958 event, and within minutes Laventhol tapped Nack to be the newspaper's new thoroughbread racing writer.

The rest is history.

In 2008, Nack returned to the Kentucky Derby and posed for a picture right by the spot where he had stood 50 years earlier to watch Tim Tam beat Lincoln Road by half a length.

Nack's article concludes on a note that could bring a wistful tear even to the most cynical eye:

Alas, all of them from those good old days are turned to fading shadows now and gone--Ed and Dave, Mom and Dad, Ben and Jimmy, Tim Tim and Gen. Duke, Charlie and the Shoe, Lincoln Road and Silky Sullivan, all those pretty horses.

Long gone, so long.

All these years later, I can still see them all. And I cannot shake, not in my dreams, not in my sleepless hammock reveries, that haunting line from William Faulkner set to the poignant rhythms of his poetry: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Marv Levy: Champion Without a Ring

It is a paradoxical reality of the sports universe that if one never makes it to the big game one can still be perceived as a winner but if one makes it to the big game repeatedly without winning it then one is generally perceived as a loser. Coach Marv Levy led the Buffalo Bills to an unprecedented four straight Super Bowls (1991-94) and if the Bills had won just one of those games then history would view Levy much more kindly--but the Bills lost all four, including three blowouts plus one game decided on a last second field goal missed by Buffalo kicker Scott Norwood, and thus it is unlikely that Levy will ever get the full credit that he is due.

Rick Telander, a narrative non-fiction master, realized that there is much more to Levy than those four Super Bowl losses; in an October 17, 1994 Sports Illustrated article titled No Joke, Telander explained why Levy is not only a great coach but also a well-rounded human being. Levy possesses the intelligence and determination to succeed in just about any field but the Harvard history major fell in love with football, a decision that did not meet with the immediate approval of his father. When he told Sam Levy what he planned to do, the elder Levy considered the matter in silence before saying simply, "Be a good one."

The stereotypical football coach breathes fire and instills fear but Marv Levy rejected that approach: "I hear sometimes that to be a good coach you have to be mean. I disagree, because the essential quality of a coach is to be a good teacher. Just because my personality is different from, say, Mike Ditka's doesn't mean a thing. What I always say is, 'Plan your work and work your plan.' If you have everything prepared, the rest takes care of itself.'"

After that fourth Super Bowl loss, Levy offered a defiant response when asked if the Bills could make a fifth straight trip to the Super Bowl: "Is our goal to win? No! Our goal is to develop our team, to earn what we get, to learn, to develop unselfish attitudes. If we achieve that, the result is that we'll win."

Those words may sound trite but coaches who have won multiple championships--including Phil Jackson and John Wooden--said very similar things: competing in sports at the highest level is about the process, about doing your work the right way and about having the proper mindset: those things do not guarantee championships but they guarantee that you can look in the mirror and know that you, in the words of Rudyard Kipling, filled "the unforgiving minute/With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run."

Bruce Newman's 1994 Tribute to Retiring Racing Legend Mario Andretti

Sports Illustrated used to feature a lengthy roster of top notch writers, including Ralph Wiley, Frank Deford, Gary Smith and Rick Reilly. Bruce Newman is not as well known as the members of that literary quartet but he is a very good writer as well. In Sports Illustrated's October 17, 1994 issue, Newman penned a tribute to racing legend Mario Andretti. Newman described Andretti's enduring legacy:

There are other drivers--artists like Jimmy Clark and Ayrton Senna--whose best days will linger longer in our memory than Andretti's, but no one was ever as successful as Andretti in so many different kinds of racing. From 1966 through '69 he won 29 Indy Car races (his eventual total would be 52), while also winning both the Daytona 500 stock car race and the 12 Hours of Sebring in '67. The following year he drove in Formula One for the first time and immediately took the pole at Watkins Glen (though he didn't finish the race). He was competing in only his second full season of F/1 racing, in '78, when he won the World Championship driving for Lotus.

In 1994, Andretti's final season on the Indy Car circuit, he finished outside of the top ten in the standings (14th) for the first time since 1981, when he only ran a partial schedule due to his Formula One commitments. He was competitive at times but he was no longer an elite driver, a fact that he well understood: "The cycle of life is what's happening. The old guys go home, new guys come out. There's no question that I've driven past my prime, but, realistically, I'm still capable of bringing home results." Newman noted, "If Andretti had stayed too long at the races, nobody seemed in any particular hurry for him to leave, least of all him." It is always poignant to see a great career wind down but Andretti handled the denouement with his customary class--and Newman described the ending with great insight and sensitivity, reminding younger readers just how great Andretti had been when he ruled virtually every track that he visited.

Sports Illustrated Figures Out That It Was Premature to Crown Federer

On June 9, 2008, I wrote a post titled Fantastic Four: Nadal Matches Borg's French Open Streak that contained this declaration (emphasis added): "For quite some time, people have been trying to anoint Federer as the greatest tennis player of all-time but despite his impressive accomplishments it makes no sense to confer that title on him when it is not even certain that he will be considered the best player of the current era: his main rival Nadal owns an 11-6 head to head record against him and has come much closer to beating him on the grass at Wimbledon than Federer has come to defeating him on the clay at the French Open. Considering that Nadal is almost five years younger than Federer it is entirely possible that he will eclipse what Federer has done; after all, five years ago Federer had just won his first Grand Slam, while Nadal already owns four Grand Slam titles, beating Federer along the way each time."

For years, SI has blithely declared that Federer is the greatest tennis player of all-time, ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary that I cited in the above post (and in several other posts at this site, dating all the way back to a July 1, 2007 post that asserted that Bjorn Borg should still be considered to be a greater all-around player than Federer).

Now, though, SI has apparently seen the light; in an article titled The Takedown that appears in the May 18, 2009 issue of SI, S.L. Price asks rhetorically, "How can Federer be deemed the best ever when he might not be the best of his own era?"

That is an excellent question and apparently my writing would be more popular in the "mainstream" if I only had the decency to wait to make such rhetorical queries until the rest of the world can figure out that they are valid. Alas, there is little reward for foresight, as Cassandra ruefully discovered many centuries ago.

Favre Not Delivering What Jets Fans Expected

Sports Illustrated's always insightful "Dr. Z" (Paul Zimmerman) offers a harsh but fair description of Brett Favre's impact thus far on the New York Jets. Zimmerman writes, "Favre came with the reputation as strongest arm in the league, a serious long-baller who would turn out the lights with his rockets"--but this season Favre is averaging just 9.9 yards per completion, one of the lowest figures in the league, an output that Zimmerman derides as "a checkdown number, a play-it-safe figure." Zimmerman also points out that the supposedly weak-armed Chad Pennington, who Favre replaced in New York, is averaging nearly two more yards per completion than Favre.

Zimmerman dismisses any criticism of the talent surrounding Favre, correctly noting, "...he's got a big league pair of wideouts in Laveranues Coles and Jerricho Cotchery. Rookie Dustin Keller is an athletic tight end drafted for his ability to stretch the field. Leon Washington is a speedy little running back who has broken many long ones in his career."

Despite Favre's conservative approach in terms of stretching the field, he still has thrown eight interceptions, the second highest total in the NFL this year.

The Jets are using the signing of Favre to try to sell prime seats that they describe as "an exclusive experience unlike any other"--and with prices starting at $5000 they certainly should be. Zimmerman says out that Favre will be retired by the time those seats are actually available in 2010 and that is why Zimmerman calls the seat auction "a real deception" and a "heist" while terming the entire Favre experience in New York a "con job."

Has the "Lost Art" of the Stolen Base Really Been Rediscovered?

It has been suggested that the lost art of the stolen base has been rediscovered this year but the numbers do not really bear this out. This year's NL leader, Willy Taveras, stole 68 bases, 10 fewer than last year's NL leader (Jose Reyes, 78); this year's AL leader, Jacoby Ellsbury, had the same number of steals (50) as last year's AL co-leaders (Carl Crawford and Brian Roberts). NL players stole 1482 bases in 2008 compared to 1564 in 2007; AL players stole 1317 bases in 2008, compared to 1354 in 2007. Those totals pale in comparison to 1999, when NL players set the modern (post 1900) league record with 1959 stolen bases; AL players stole 1462 bases that season, which is not the modern AL record but is the second highest total for that league between 1999 and 2008.

Sports Illustrated's coverage of the supposed rebirth of the stolen base included an amusing contradiction. In Chris Ballard's September 15, 2008 story titled "The Art of the Steal," Davey Lopes--who ranks 25th in career steals with 557 and is currently a baserunning coach for the Phillies--said, "You hear guys say, 'He's at full speed at two steps.' Usain Bolt, the guy who just won the Olympics, he isn't at full speed at two steps. If a guy's at full speed at two steps, then he's slow. You follow me?" However, in the September 22, 2008 issue, there is this statement by Ron Fimrite from a September 6, 1982 story about Rickey Henderson setting the single season steals record (courtesy of the SI Vault): "There may be faster men in the big leagues--Willie Wilson? Kirk Gibson? Tim Raines?--but none reaches maximum speed quicker than Henderson, who needs but two steps to do so, and none hits the base with such force."