I read this work some years back and considered it as I do now the most comprehensive work on the horse. Bill covers not only Secretariat's pedigree in great depth but also Penny's family ancestry, several generations. In so doing, he covers much of 'whos who' in the ancestry of American racing. Bill covers in depth many of Secretariats races, before and after, all the way through the triple crown events afterwhich he seems to soften up, as if the remaining were just mop-up. I wish he would have added additional material covering his days at Claiborne. If one wishes to become a Secretariat aficionado, this is a must read. There are a number of other works out there but this one I believe is the base from which to start. It is a long read so have fun.
William Nack, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion 2/E (Da Capo, 2002)
I finished this book back in July, and here it is November. I don't know why it is that I sometimes have problems figuring out what to say about a book to the point where I end up leaving it for four months, and why it is that it's always a horse book (to this day, I still have not reviewed Jane Schwartz' Ruffian: Burning from the Start, which I read in 2004) that causes this sort of blockage, but so it is.
Obviously, this is the story of Secretariat, the horse who wowed a nation in 1972 and 1973. The subtitle should have twigged me to the fact that the later part of his career was going to get short shrift, but somehow I didn't grasp that until I got to the penultimate chapter and we were still only up to the Belmont. Still, it's your basic horse biography--a focus on the horse himself, yes, but also a lot of talking about the horse's connections. Oftentimes, that's not nearly as interesting (at least, for the horse lover), but Nack's writing combined with the momentous events going on around him at the time keep the areas where the book focuses on the human part of the equation almost as interesting as the parts about Secretariat himself. (Prospective authors of horse biographies may be wondering just how much, in fact, readers can take of reading about stall routines, workouts, getting ready for races, cooling down from races, and all the rest of the minutiae of the horse himself. I'm here to tell you that such a book would be my favorite of the horse biographies I've read.)
The new edition of the book published in 2002 also contains, as an afterword, Nack's touching Sports Illustrated essay on Secretariat's death, for which Nack--purely by coincidence--was on hand. Even if you already own the original edition of the book, it's at least worth getting it out of the library to read the supplementary materials in the updated edition. This is very good stuff, as most horse biographies are. ****
The Horse Who Ran History's Greatest Race
No one who watched Secretariat win the Belmont Stakes in 1973 will ever forget that performance. For many, it immediately stamped him as the "greatest racehorse of all time" among many. I thought the same thing, frankly, until recently when I read a book about Man o' War, who really is the best ever if you're objective about it. However, for a Triple Crown series and for one race - that Belmont - no horse ever has ever come close to accomplishing what Secretariat did that year. Secretariat's Belmont was the greastest effort in one race in history. This book will convince you of that. The chapter describing his performance in that incredible 31-length victory in record time (which still stands) is worth the price of book alone!
Along with the ups-and-downs of Secretariat's brief career, we get interesting looks at the horse's trainer, Lucien Laurin; the owner "Penny" Tweedy and the jockey, Ron Turcotte, as well as other horse racing notables of the time period.
Author William Nack does a wonderful job showing everyone's good and bad sides. Nack is considered one of the best sportswrites of his generation, so you know you're going to get a well-written book here and a worthy author to a most-worthy horse!
