Longtime Southern Calif. sports & turf writer Art Wilson dies

Art Wilson, whose long Southern California sports-writing career was fueled greatly by his passion for horse racing, died Sunday morning of heart failure after a decade-long fight with a rare form of blood cancer. He was 71.

Wilson suffered from multiple myeloma, kidney disease and congestive heart failure, his younger brother Eddie told the Los Angeles Daily News. He had been hospitalized in Apple Valley, Calif., near his home in Victorville.

“According to Eddie he was fully alert, cognizant and everything, and he went all of a sudden from heart failure,” Santa Anita publicist Mike Willman reported Sunday morning on his Thoroughbred Los Angeles radio program. He said Wilson died at 3:30 a.m. PST.

Wilson spent most of his 52-year career at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in West Covina, Calif. He rose to the role of sports editor both there and at the eventually co-owned Pasadena Star-News.

In recent years Wilson had been a writer for the Southern California News Group, which included the Tribune and Star-News. His regular racing column was a Friday morning fixture in print that in time built a bigger following when it was posted online Thursday afternoons.

Growing up in Southern California, Wilson and his brother, also known as handicapper Eddie the Hat, were introduced to horse racing by their father.

“I guess they used to go to the races and tagged along with their dad, who was a TV repairman (who) liked betting on long shots,” Willman said. “He passed that on to his kids.”

“A lot of people think I’m crazy, but I don’t bet anything less than 5-1,” Wilson told the Ron Flatter Racing Pod four years ago. “I’ll bet 2-1 if I’m playing a Pick 4 or Pick 5, but if I’m making separate bets, there’s no way I’ll bet less than 5-1. It’s getting harder and harder now to get those 5-1 odds because of the short fields.”

Wilson’s handle on X, formerly Twitter, was @Sham73. That was a tribute to the Hall of Famer and his favorite horse Sham. The 1973 Santa Anita Derby (G1) winner went on to finish second ahead of Secretariat in the Wood Memorial (G1) only to finish second behind the eventual Triple Crown winner in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness and then last trying to keep up with the big red chestnut in a record-shattering Belmont Stakes.

“The minute you mention Secretariat, it’s just a bad word in my mouth,” Wilson said. “Great horse. Great horse. But to me, he’ll always be the horse that shuffled my all-time favorite Sham into the background. The footnote with Sham is not how great he was. He was just Secretariat’s bridesmaid. He’ll never get the credit he deserves.”

Wilson was a young adult that memorable season of 1973. It came just a couple years after an early visit to the track left a big impression.

“As a fan I remember I got indoctrinated back in ’71. I remember the name of the horse that won the feature race that day was Princessnesian,” Wilson said. “The first big race I came out to see was the ’73 Santa Anita Derby, and I fell in love with Sham.”

Wilson also became a big fan of the Texas Rangers largely because of his favorite Los Angeles Dodgers player Frank Howard.

“A 9-year-old kid meeting Frank at a West Covina mall,” he said. “Just looking up at him, a giant of a man. Ever since then I was hooked. Listening to Vin Scully on the radio talking about all these mammoth home runs he hit, I was just hooked. When he got traded from the Dodgers to the (Washington) Senators in December of ’64, I just kept my allegiances to the Senators. Of course, they became the Texas Rangers, and I’m still a huge Rangers fan to this day.”

Howard died only two days before the Rangers won that elusive World Series championship last fall, finally rewarding Wilson for more than six decades of loyalty and patience.

A native of Massachusetts who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, Wilson was fresh out of Cal Poly Pomona when he began his career in September 1975 at the Tribune. He worked part-time in a room with a then cutting-edge version of ticker tape that would be converted to written type.

“You’d have to pull the tape,” he said. “It would come off a machine, and they’d run it through some kind of machine, and it would show up on the old beehive computers that we had. ... In our newsroom we had the old sturdy plastic trash cans, and the tapes would be attached with a clothespin to the top of the trash can, and that’s how we sorted it out.”

From that era through the changes from hot type to cold, teletypes to computers, typewriters to laptops, printing presses to digital distribution, Wilson covered all levels of sports in Southern California from the big leagues to high schools. All the while the constant in his professional and personal life was horse racing.

Wilson even tried his hand at ownership. Once.

“(It) was a horse named Lucky Stab,” he said. “She was supposed to race in a $12,500 claimer for us, and it rained that morning. The races got canceled because the track didn’t drain. Two or three days later she came down with a bad foot. She never raced again. We ended up selling her to a blacksmith who used her as a broodmare. That was my closest claim to fame as far as a horse owner.”

Wilson still had the program, though, a keepsake with his name printed on the owner’s line.

With a reputation for professional longevity at the keyboard, Wilson may have been known as much for a big smile that was ever present in press boxes, even in recent years as he showed the physical signs of his fight with cancer. He rarely let his deteriorating health keep him from being there in person for the biggest days of racing. Wilson covered the Breeders’ Cup last fall and was in the Santa Anita press box just last weekend.

“Art was a true gem,” said Randy Hill, a contemporary of Wilson who was sports editor in the early ’90s at the Star-News. “I can’t recall anyone as kind or genuine.”

Wilson is survived by his wife Kimberley, his brother Eddie, his sister Deborah Wills, a nephew and three cousins. A memorial service will be scheduled next month at Oakdale Mortuary in Glendora, Calif., according to a Santa Anita news release.

Wilson’s last column that was posted last week was about the late country-music singer and horse owner Toby Keith, himself a cancer victim.

He closed with a line referring to Keith’s fans in a way that applies now to Wilson’s family and friends.

“They know full well now that the good do die young.”