Bohls: Our Riggles was famously never late, but he definitely left us way too early
Randy Riggs left us far too soon.
Why wouldn’t he?
After all, he always had to get where he was going way before anyone else.
Heck, Texas A&M sports information director Alan Cannon always joked that when Riggs was on the Aggies beat, he’d get to the Kyle Field press box before Cannon did. One time Riggs got there so early, he had to get the A&M security guard to open the gates.
It’s extremely sad to report that Riggs died Thursday at his South Austin home way too early at age 71 after almost a two-year bout with liposarcoma cancer.
Suzanne Halliburton, a longtime colleague of ours, said it best: “Randy probably got to the pearly gates before St. Peter did.”
But he’s there now, and I guarantee you that he has the cleanest desk in heaven, every paper clip in its place. He already knows the best places to grab a chicken-fried steak in heaven, and he’s totally at peace, secure in his Christian faith as the beloved patriarch of a tightly knit family that includes his adoring wife, Patti, son Adam and daughter Katy.
That’s Randy Riggs. Or Riggles, as we knew him for almost half a century.
He also went by “The Big Stud,” this gentle giant of a man many of you knew as a very well-respected sports writer at what former colleague Brian Davis always called the “paragraph factory” before Riggles retired in 2013.
Riggles put together some damn good paragraphs for the American-Statesman in a career that spanned well over 36 years here. And what a career he had.
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“Randy didn’t come to Austin to set the world on fire,” said sports writer buddy Al Carter, who worked with Riggles at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times and whose wife, Mary, set up Randy and Patti on a blind date. “He wanted to be a good soldier and do the absolute best job he could do. And he did. He was very good at getting to the bottom of stories.”
Riggles met the Carters early after his move from Lubbock, where he had been a courts reporter and on the crime beat. When he arrived in Corpus Christi, he needed to open a bank account.
He dutifully walked up the bluff from the paper to the closest bank and hit it off with a really cute bank teller, who engaged Randy in conversation. The two were getting along just fine until Mary Carter walked around to show off her nine-month pregnancy and informed him she was the wife of his new co-worker, Al.
Riggles was a lot of things. He had a dry wit. He was reliable. He was trusted by players and coaches. He was a jack of all trades, having covered every Texas Relays for decades, the Southwest Conference and Longhorns and Aggies football, to name a few of his many beats. He touched all the bases. And I doubt he ever missed a single deadline. He had the neatest desk of any sports writer, which Carter calls the perfect oxymoron. He was as orderly as he was organized, a consummate pro.
He’d turn in the cleanest copy of anyone ever, remembers good friend Kevin Lyttle, who used to edit Riggles’ stories before he, too, became a fine writer.
Our editors would constantly joke that no one ever was better at turning in his stories to the exact budgeted length. If he ever punched the send button on a game story that was a tenth of an inch over length, one wiseacre on the desk would comment, “There goes Riggs again, writing too long.”
Trust me, I know about writing long as the most overly verbose writer probably in Statesman history.
Not Riggles. He wrote to length. He was concise. He wrote accurately. He was so thorough in his reporting, as fastidious as he was fast.
And he was my friend. A wonderful friend since 1978. And I will miss him dearly.
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As I said, not only was he early to press boxes — like three hours early — he was an early riser as well and usually beat the custodians to work at the Statesman. “I’d always get there early,” Statesman alumnus Mark Rosner said, “and he’d put me to shame.”
I’ll be honest.
We were not always thrilled to be the Johnnies-on-the-spot in press boxes on the road, but for some reason we deferred to Riggles, partly because he always agreed to rent the car and be the designated driver. He loved to be in control.
I do recall one time when Texas was playing a football game at Iowa State. Rosner, Alan Trubow and I were mesmerized watching a back-and-forth A&M-Arkansas game at a Bennigan’s when Riggles announced in the fourth quarter that it was time to hit the road from Des Moines to Ames. We begrudgingly acceded to his wishes and headed off just in time to beat the three-car traffic jam outside Jack Trice Stadium three hours before kickoff.
Now, don’t go thinking Riggles didn’t know how to have a good time.
I mean, this bearded giant was a total softie. His daughter, Katy, used to have a pair of clip-on cat ears and persuaded her dad to put them on for a picture they had framed. “Dad was always super chill and wasn’t afraid to do things that made me laugh,” she said. “There’s so much to miss, but his goofiness is going to be impossible to replace.”
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Riggles loved him some Sherlock Holmes, so much that he and the late Texas Tech coach Mike Leach bonded over their mutual admiration for the detective series. He always read the “Peanuts” comic strip. He grew up in West Virginia, with his dad taking him to Pirates games in Pittsburgh.
Can’t say we shared that admiration. He never tired of needling me, a diehard Yankees fan, with but a single mention of his favorite player, Bill Mazeroski.
Riggles was a consummate family guy, whether he was driving Adam to the Oak Hill Little League fields for his football and baseball games or cranking up the Suburban to take Adam, Katy and Patti on their many cross-country vacations to Mount Rushmore or Monticello or Disney World.
He never tired of taking his beloved “Miss Patti” to their romantic hideaway spot on the hill of St. Edward’s University overlooking Austin, the secret place where he popped the question in 1979, not too long after that first date.
❝They went to see the movie ❛Superman,❜❞ Carter said, ❝and after that, Patti told us, ❛He’s my Superman.❜❞
Superman also had his mischievous side. We won’t go into detail about the college prank he and his buddies at the campus daily at then-North Texas State might or might not have pulled off that might or might not have involved a fake bomb threat at the university president’s home. Kids.
Back in the day, on the Fridays before the Texas-OU game in the ❜80s and ❜90s, the two schools would spring for a media luncheon at Casa Dominguez and hand out ticket stubs to be redeemed for free margaritas. Not wanting to appear anti-social, Riggles and I would take them up on the offer and somehow sample somewhere between two and 12 frozen margaritas.
Again, details are fuzzy now, as they were then, but let it be said, by the time we retired to our hotel room at a Holiday Inn on Stemmons Freeway to craft perfect prose in our Longhorns-Sooners matchups for the Saturday game, we somehow managed to spell a few words right for the next day’s paper.
Surely the statute of limitations has expired since then. If not, you know how sports writers can embellish from time to time.
But we never shirked the call of duty. There was the one night in El Paso before a Texas-Washington Sun Bowl game when we got a tip that Darrell Royal was retiring at age 55 as UT athletic director. We drove all over town, and finally learned school administrators were at a dinner party atop a high-rise bank building about 9 o’clock that night.
We dutifully took the elevator to the top floor, asked the maitre d' to talk to first-year UT President Peter Flawn and were stunned to learn he was soon actually walking out to the restaurant lobby to meet with us. When we revealed our breaking news, an exasperated Flawn threw up his hands and said, “OK, OK, you’re right; it’s true.”
And we had our scoop and got it in the paper the next morning.
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Riggles and I were first on the scene at a major event in Houston to cover the 1980 Bluebonnet Bowl on New Year’s Eve, when we’d heard that afternoon that Bum Phillips had been fired as Oilers head coach. We hopped in the car, drove to his ranch outside the city and were the first reporters to arrive. Bum invited us to his back porch and wowed us with his perspective and poise. I’d have sworn we felt worse than he did.
Riggles, like any good sports writer worth his Rolodex, wasn’t shy around a buffet. Even after he retired, about six of us would meet at the paper, former columnist John Maher would pick up Franklin’s barbecue, and we’d chow down.
That gave way to weekly gatherings on Wednesdays at Lotus Hunan in Westlake, where six of us Statesman typists and honorary Statesman alum Tom Dore have gathered for almost two decades. We broke bread, or egg rolls, as a group for the final time with Riggles in December.
When Riggles first came to work at the Statesman from Corpus Christi, we all covered prep football on Friday nights. Afterward we’d all trek to Hill’s Cafe on South Congress Avenue after grabbing papers off the presses and pore over game accounts while downing the mandatory chicken-fried steaks, rolls and gravy. Pretty much explains our waistlines today.
Maher, citing the location of our sports desks near the elevators, said, “If someone got off the elevator, and Rosner looked, it must be a pretty girl. And if Riggles looked, it must be a pretty girl carrying barbecue.”
Not that those heavy meals stopped us from “thinking” we were athletes.
Riggles was always part of our traditional Friday morning flag football games at Royal-Memorial Stadium. Our basketball pickup games at the Austin Rec Center were as intense as they come. Riggles was our pitcher in softball games. But he really stood out as a pivotal player on our city league flag football teams, one of which went 10-0 to win the city championship. Pivotal? Heck, he was our best receiver on the team.
Now, Clarence Hill, Michael Hurd and my brother Rodney might tell you they were our best deep threats, but Riggles was our best shallow threat. You see, he played center. When we got inside the 1-yard line, Riggles would snap the ball, then find a soft spot in the end zone, and I’d whip him the ball for nearly automatic touchdowns. He was unstoppable.
Then we went across the street to have charcoal-grilled burgers at the Holiday House with a pitcher of beer. Or two.
We were the Media Mallards, and we were pretty much the Georgia Bulldogs of our day. In one game, Riggles happened to catch a pass at midfield and was streaking — OK, he was loping — toward the goal line when a defender reached for his red flag and accidentally yanked his pants down.
While we all stopped in our tracks, there was the always supportive Patti Riggs, who yelled lovingly from the sidelines, “That’s my husband!”
Yes, he most certainly was.
And that was Riggles, our faithful friend, reliable teammate and respected colleague as well.
As usual, making his presence felt, being a team guy and standing out from the crowd, pants or no pants.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Former Statesman sportswriter Randy Riggs has left us way too early
