Robert Riger

• Name — Robert Riger • Birth Name — Robert Nelson Cooke • Born — June 4, 1924 • Birthplace — New York City • Died — May 19, 1995 • Place of death — Huntington Beach, California • Known for — Illustration, Photography, Cinematography • Training — Pratt Institute • Awards — 9 Emmy Awards, 1994 Sports Artist of the Year

Born in 1924 in Manhattan, Riger attended The High School of Music & Art, and the United States Merchant Marine Academy, and later earned a BA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After serving three years in the Merchant Marine during World War II, Riger made his first sports drawing in 1945: a scene from an Army-Notre Dame football game. From 1947 to 1949 Riger did magazine layout for Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post, then worked as an advertising art director until 1955, when he became a freelance illustrator. He was a regular contributor to Sports Illustrated since its first month of publication in 1954. During his career, the magazine published more than 1,200 of his editorial drawings and over 200 of his promotional and advertising drawings.

Riger was the son of Harry St. John Cooke and Irene Teresa Riger of New York city. He first married Eleanor Sanger (the first U.S. woman television sports producer) in 1950 and had four children by their marriage, Christopher Riger, (1951-), Victoria Riger Phillips, (1952-), Robert Paris Riger (1960-2018), and Charlotte Irene Riger, (1963-). His second marriage was to the writer Dawn Aberg; their children are Ariel Aberg-Riger (1981-) and John Maxwell Aberg-Riger (1983-).

In 1950, he began taking photographs as a research tool for his drawings. What started as a secondary medium became what Riger was most known for. He described his approach to sports journalism: You cannot possibly photograph sport unless you understand it completely, and understand and know the men who play it. The same intensity they have to play the game you must have to record it. Not stop it, but suspend it forever in time. From 1950 to 1994, he copyrighted more than 90,000 master photographic negatives, more than 40,000 of them involving pro football. Many of these photographs appeared in Sports Illustrated, and Riger published two ground-breaking books of sports photo-journalism: The Pros: A Documentary of Professional Football in America (1960) and The American Diamond (1965). In addition to football and baseball, Riger's images cover boxing, horse racing, and all things Olympic. (see Getty Images) His subjects were celebrated athletes of the day: Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Jack Nicklaus, Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas, Frank Gifford, Muhammad Ali, Jim Clark, Eddie Arcaro, Nadia Comăneci, Wilma Rudolph, Pelé and those who coached them Vince Lombardi, Willie Schaeffler among others.

Riger's television career began with Monday morning football analysis on Today (NBC Program) on NBC in 1961. In 1963, he began three years of world travel and weekly appearances on ABC's Wide World of Sports (U.S. TV series)," 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. He developed his ground breaking slow-motion video work on the broadcasts of the 1968, 1976 and 1984 Summer Olympic Games and the 1980 Winter Olympic Games. As Second Unit Director, Riger was responsible for the acclaimed soccer sequences in the movie Escape to Victory (1981), directed by John Huston, which deals with Allied prisoners of war facing German soccer stars during World War II and starring Sylvester Stallone.