Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion barn, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Ky., where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”

And so began the story by William Nack about Secretariat, the most spectacular thoroughbred of my lifetime. In 1973, he became the first racehorse in a quarter-century to win the Triple Crown, and he did it with the panache and ego of Ali in his prime.

Nack’s story ran in the June 4, 1990 edition of Sports Illustrated and is easily found by Googling “Pure Heart William Nack.” I encourage you to take 20 minutes and read it. Secretariat as a foal, trotting out of the mist in a pasture, and Nack seeing him, and a friendship formed…the record-breaking journey to the Triple Crown, Secretariat’s retirement, and then his death that October day in 1989…and then this story written by one of his best friends and admirers, one of my favorite SI stories ever.

Mr. Nack passed away last week. I should have written him to tell him that I still read that story every year at this time. What a wonderful word artist he was…

The Kentucky Derby looms. Read “Pure Heart.” It will be a welcomed primer.

-30-