Good luck getting William Nack to sit still for an interview.

During a visit this spring to promote his latest book, “My Turf — Horses, Boxers, Blood Money and the Sporting Life” (Da Capo Press, February 2003), he seemed eager to get moving.

“Do you have any golf clubs? It’d be great to take a couple of sticks and hit some balls. You could interview me doing that — then you’d have some action,” said Nack, 62, who recently retired from a career of 23 years spent writing for Sports Illustrated.

This was in mid-April when former Kansas University basketball coach Roy Williams was trying to decide whether to stay at KU or head to greener pastures in his native North Carolina.

And Nack was closely following events on Campanile hill.

In 1997, he wrote a profile of Williams for Sports Illustrated and said he was deeply impressed by the man’s decency.

During his visit to Lawrence, Nack asked a Journal-World reporter if he could hitch a ride to KU’s athletic department to catch up with Williams for a moment.

“I’d like to say ‘hi’ and ask him, ‘What are you doing?’ (about the coaching job)” he said.

But meeting with Williams, his former subject, wasn’t really the purpose of Nack’s coming to town. Aside from promoting “My Turf,” the Washington, D.C.-based writer was taking some time to renew his ties with Frank and Jayni Carey, Lawrence friends he’d met while interviewing Williams in 1997.

Nack agreed to tape an installment of the cooking show “Jayni’s Kitchen” on Sunflower Broadband’s Channel 6.

Though Nack, who does freelance work for Sports Illustrated and GQ magazines, has spent much of the past two decades in the company of coaches, boxers and jockeys, the kitchen is one of his favorite places to be.

“Cooking is somewhere in the no man’s land between a hobby and a passion. I love to read cookbooks. I go to sleep reading a cookbook,” Nack said.

Cooking with Nack — or, rather, watching him cook and interviewing him at the same time — proved to be a treat.

As he prepared dishes during the taping of Carey’s show, he shared anecdotes of the famous figures he’s known and, on occasion, even cooked for.

Like former heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson.

Nack first met the trouble-prone athlete when he was 18 or 19 years old, and later covered Tyson’s 1992 rape trial in Indianapolis.

“The guy really didn’t have a chance,” the writer said of the ear-munching boxer’s gritty upbringing. “Then you give him a hundred million dollars … I’d love to get him alone for an hour and talk to him, off the record, and ask him, ‘What the hell’s going on?'”

Nack recalled making his chicken tarragon with sauteed mushrooms and wild rice — one of the dishes he also prepared while taping “Jayni’s Kitchen” — for Tyson in the early days of his boxing career.

At the time, Tyson was in his late teens and was an unknown.

“He was a six-round fighter knocking everybody out. He had steak, everybody else had chicken, but he tasted it,” Nack said of that memorable meal.

As he told stories of his years covering sports, the writer explained how he came to form a love for cooking.

“My wife and I (Nack is now divorced) had four children, and midway through that nurturing process, she got a job. She said, ‘I’ll do the cooking when you’re not around, and you do the cooking when I’m not around.’ I got into recipes. I bought some cookbooks,” he said.

“It’s a real delightful thing. It gave me something that I love to do. I’d watch Julia Childs, I got into French cooking. Julia does things by the book. My wife would come in and say, ‘You can cut corners with that.’ And I’d say, ‘You can’t do that. Julia doesn’t cut corners.’ She was exasperated: ‘We’re not going to eat for two hours!'”

Poetry of good recipes

Nack’s accomplishments outside the kitchen are unquestioned.

He is a multiple winner of the Eclipse Award, given annually for the best magazine piece on horse racing and has been selected several times for inclusion in the “Best Sports Writing” annuals.

Nack is known for his standout profiles and investigative stories, writing accounts of famous athletes (human and nonhuman) and weighing in on some of the most controversial events and personalities during the past quarter century.

Nack’s also known for his acclaimed biography of the great race horse Secretariat, who won the triple crown 30 years ago. “Secretariat — The Making of a Champion” (Da Capo Press) was published in 1975, re-issued in 1988 and has been in print since.

Laura Hillenbrand, author of the New York Times best-selling “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” (Ballantine, March 2002) has called Nack’s “Secretariat” the “gold standard of horse books.”

Nack actually credits cooking with helping him as a writer.

“One of the things I like about it is you can think. I’ve written stories over the stove,” he said, referring to the process of putting the pieces of a story together in his head.

“In the middle of writing, I’d get up and cook something. It’s a great activity to do that. It induces a terrific reverie. You can dream, think and create. It’s like background music. It’s a lullaby. It keeps my hands busy.”

Nack said he sees a lot of overlap between writing and cooking.

“Both require a willingness to take chances. Cooking is like that — you’ve got to improvise. That’s why I love to read cookbooks. I see something, and I say, ‘Ah.’ It’s like seeing a good sentence. You can see the poetry in a good recipe.”