“As a boy I grew up over the Polo Grounds in New York and lived in the apartment house on the right at the top of this early photograph. I could hear the crowd roar when I walked home from school or was doing my homework. The old ballpark had two decks with a long opening between them. I would sit on the rocks at Coogan’s Bluff with the regulars and watch the Giants play baseball and the New York Football Giants play football from that high vantage point. Some of us had binoculars. Later on for 55 cents I sat in the bleachers on Sunday to watch a pro football game. I loved Tuffy Lehmans of the Giants, loved it when the Bears and Redskins came to town. From the end zone I saw the pattern of play, the deception and blocking and this perspective became football to me. 

I did some football sketches and a big drawing over that summer and Ray Walsh and Jack Mara gave me my first field pass to work from the sidelines during their games. “Who are we to stand in the way of a great career,” they quipped and a firm friendship began.

A few months later I took the same drawings to Time-Life who were just about to start a new magazine in 1954. Sports Illustrated liked my drawings and began giving me work. Those were the big breaks that got me started.”

- Robert Riger in his “Career Bio,” 1994