If there is any consolation at all to the death of Bill Nack last Friday night, it is found in the likely fact that his work will receive the customary post-mortem bump in attention enjoyed by all great artists. So, for those who have not let their reading of Nack stray far beyond his biography of Secretariat, “Big Red of Meadow Stable,” or his valediction “Pure Heart” upon the death of the great Triple Crown champion, here are some suggestions from his Sports Illustrated years now that his voice has been silenced and all the evidence is in: Read “Scaling New Heights” (SI issue of Nov. 17, 1986) about Laffit Pincay and the suicide death of his wife, Linda. Read “Blood Money” (issue of Nov. 16, 1992) about the killing of show horses for their insurance. Read “The Breaking Point” (issue of Nov. 1, 1993) about the growing connection between racehorse injuries and legal medications. Nack’s readers always were left with the feeling that they were ingesting literature disguised as reporting. He extolled students of the craft to write non-fiction as if they were writing fiction, which is far easier said than done, since one requires a tireless rigor and devotion to verifiable facts and the other calls for a bottomless depth of creative invention. The result, in Bill’s case, was a body of work that elevated the subject of sports to broad cultural significance, placing him shoulder to shoulder alongside giants such as Ring Lardner, Red Smith, and David Halberstam, and echoed today by the likes of Dave Zirin and Charles Pierce. Nack became a great writer because he was a great reader, and he took to heart the inspired use of language by Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Especially Fitzgerald. Consider these alternate passages, rendering image, and emotion in vivid union: “The plush curtain of the confessional rearranged its dismal creases, leaving exposed only the bottom of an old man’s old shoe. Behind the curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend Adolphus Schwartz, priest of the parish. Sound began, a labored whispering, sibilant and discreet, broken at intervals by the voice of the priest in audible question.” – from “Absolution,” by Fitzgerald. “Davis bolted for the first aid room, opened the door of the broom closet and closed it behind him, leaving himself alone in the sudden dark. He fell to his knees. His whole life flashed past him, as though it was he who was dying, and in a way he was.” – from “The Longest Ride,” by Nack. “It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip in the leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before he realized he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson.” – from “May Day,” by Fitzgerald. “It was chilly in the shade at Belmont Park, and steam rose from the filly’s moist, perspiring flank. Erck stroked the 3-year-old’s neck and face, and then he reached over and patted her on the nose. ‘Easy, girl,’ Erck murmured. ‘Just relax. It will just be a few minutes now. It’ll be over soon.’ ” – from “Requiem at Belmont,” by Nack. In describing his most famous character, Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” So that was taken. But Nack was not discouraged, and when it came to chronicling the story of Secretariat – a character he did not need to invent – Nack answered the challenge through the persistence of interview and the solid-gold currency of first-hand observation. Over time, the smallest details were piled so high that Secretariat seemed to be performing just for Nack, who would shake his head and duly record the moment. “Everything Secretariat did, every move he made, had a kind of flourish to it,” Nack wrote of the moments before Secretariat’s Preakness. “Near midstretch the red horse suddenly stopped, raised his golden tail and defecated, and the crowd in the grandstands erupted in cheers and applause. Then he strode off imperiously down the stretch again. Seconds later he wheeled to the left, pivoting and bucking slightly, and that, too, drew more howls of delight.” I first met Bill at the 1981 Arlington Million, a daunting experience, since he was a known associate of my personal gallery of such writing role models as Pete Axthelm, Hunter Thompson, Jack Mann, and William Leggett. Then, at some point, the hero becomes real, and you relax, because just like you they have feet of clay, dark doubts, trouble with rental cars. As noted in every tribute to Nack in recent days, he delighted in reciting the closing passages of “The Great Gatsby” at the drop of a gold hat. One writer called it a parlor trick, and I suppose it was, especially to those of us who don’t have any. Nack was not showing off, though. He was teaching by example. “You want to know what the immortal written word sounds like?” he was saying. “This is what it sounds like.” And so he began: “Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world.” Gatsby was a tragic character. Bill Nack was not. But Nack did embody what Fitzgerald identified as Gatsby’s greatest attribute, as voiced by the novel’s narrator: “It was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.” And that’s that. Bill is gone, so now it is time for a new generation of racing journalists to pick up the torch and run faster and farther, if they can. And if it helps, as an intellectual exercise, or an old-fashioned parlor trick, I would suggest giving Fitzgerald a rest and instead memorizing the final, expansive paragraph of “Big Red of Meadow Stable,” and share it often: “Outside the sun was down and it grew colder now by the grove of trees in the dark by the stallion barn. Leaves fell, and a fair wind strummed and turned along the trees that rose along the paddocks in the back. Then in the distance, beyond the Claiborne fields toward the home called Marchmont, the sound of a horse whinnying rose. Secretariat came to the window of his stall, and through the darkness of it you could see nothing but rims of his eyes and hear the breathing in the quiet. The sound of the whinnying rose again, and beyond that and beyond the rows of fences and the fields of grass and the salmon-colored sky, beyond the stands of trees strung out along the skies of Paris, there was the sound of horses charging the bend and the crowd on its feet roaring and the announcer calling the name of a lone figure of a horse reaching and snapping, pounding in a rush, at the turn for home.”