Robert Riger

Robert Riger enjoyed success in everything he did. A celebrated sport artist, photographer, award-winning television producer, director and cinematographer, Riger was selected as the American Sport Art Museum and Archives' 1994 Sport Artist of the Year. Months after receiving his "Order of the Eagle Exemplar" medallion for his accomplishments, Riger died untimely from glandular cancer on May 19, 1995.

After serving three years in the Merchant Marines during World War II, Riger made his first sports drawing, a scene from an Army-Notre Dame football game that required five lithograph pencils and 140 hours. Since that humble beginning, Sports Illustrated published more than 1,200 of his editorial drawings and more than 200 of his promotional and advertising drawings.

In 1950, he started taking photographs as a research tool for his drawings. From 1950 to 1994, he copyrighted more than 90,000 master photographic negatives, more than 40,000 of them involving pro football.

He was a documentary photographer in the sense that his first commitment was to recording those aspects of life that fascinated him and he was drawn to the dramas of the great stadiums. He had an acute insight into what it is that athletes do, and an uncanny knack for capturing the decisive instant in a play or gesture. Professional football was his first love, followed by baseball, and his subjects were heroes in their own right: Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas, Casey Stengal and others.

Riger's television career began as an on-camera performer on the "Today Show" on NBC in 1960. In 1963, he began three years of world travel and weekly appearances on "ABC's Wide World of Sports," doing the incisive on-camera picture reporting that preceded the days of color and gave ABC Sports an added dimension to their coverage.

At ABC, where he worked from 1963 to 1970 and again from 1977 to 1980, he won nine Emmy awards. His video work with the broadcasts of the 1976 and 1984 Summer Olympics and the 1980 Winter Olympics brought the phrase the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat to life.

As a more permanent record of his work and a display of the completeness with which Riger attacked every task, there are the definitive books he produced on sports. The Pros, a documentary of professional football in America, was the classic that first published Riger's photographs. Run To Daylight, with his friend Vince Lombardi, The Last Loud Roar, with Bob Cousy, and The American Diamond, with Branch Rickey, together sold more than a half-million copies.

After learning he had cancer, Riger continued to pursue his profession and completed his 13th book, The Sports Photography of Robert Riger, and finished a five-week exhibit of his photography at the James Danziger Gallery. Also, Riger enjoyed directing and co-directing movies. He was responsible for all the soccer sequences in the movie Victory, which deals with Allied prisoners of war facing German soccer stars during World War II and starring Sylvester Stallone.