SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
In 1947, an Indiana teenager began a mission to record radio broadcasts. Today, he has more than 44,000 recordings, including some of the rarest games in sports history and some of the most famous calls. As Sara Wittmeyer reports, there's no audio collection in the world as extensive or cataloged as precisely.
SARA WITTMEYER, BYLINE: John Miley was 17 years old when he stopped to pick up his friend for school and saw him using a device John had never seen.
JOHN MILEY: I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm taping myself. I've got a microphone here and I'm taping on this wire. I said, well, that's interesting. I wonder if I could do that with sports.
WITTMEYER: John's allowance was a dollar a week. The wire recorder cost $160 at Sears and Roebuck. He needed his parents' help.
MILEY: I asked my dad if it would be possible to get one of those. He - unbelievably, he said, yes.
WITTMEYER: Now 93-years-old, Miley has the recorder set up in his home office near Evansville, Indiana.
MILEY: OK. Let me show you what I do.
WITTMEYER: He walks over to his computer, next to a rack of more current recorders he still uses today. Miley has more than 2 million hours of recordings, and he queues up one of the first he ever made - 1947, the college football Rose Bowl. It's UCLA versus the University of Illinois. Announcer Bill Stern makes the call.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL STERN: Not a particularly brilliant kick but a hard one to handle. It's squirming away from two ball players. Goes all the way back to Al Hoisch who takes it in his end zone. He's 5 yards...
WITTMEYER: Illinois defeated UCLA, 45 to 14. Now Miley has a recording of almost every Rose Bowl since. He's never had problems with copyright issues. He says rules haven't always been as strict as they are now, and his connections in the sports and broadcasting industries are strong. Meticulously cataloged and organized, you'll also find nearly every World Series game since 1934. It was 1955 when Vin Scully delivered the call in the World Series.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
VIN SCULLY: Ball one. Robinson, kind of shaking up the ballpark a bit, as he dances down on third.
WITTMEYER: Jackie Robinson's on third base. He looks towards home and starts running.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SCULLY: Robi's coming to the plate. The throw to Berra, and he steals it.
BOB COSTAS: No one and no entity has as much stuff and as precisely cataloged as John Miley does.
WITTMEYER: Hall of Fame sports broadcaster Bob Costas met Miley in the 1970s, when Costas worked at the AM station, KMOX in St. Louis.
COSTAS: I was stunned by what he had even then, in 1976. Now, some of it was among the greatest moments in sports history. You know, Louis knocks out Schmeling.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CLEM MCCARTHY: Right to the body. A left hook to the jaw. And Schmeling is down.
COSTAS: Or Jesse Owens at the '36 Olympics.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JESSE OWENS: I'm very proud to have won. Wonderful competition here. Wonderful stadium and a wonderful crowd. And the days has been very nice. And the people here in Germany have been very nice to me, and I'm very glad to be doing my job here. Thank you.
WITTMEYER: Again, Bob Costas.
COSTAS: When I got to NBC and later to HBO, anytime we were doing historical stuff, one of my suggestions was, let me check with John Miley. And very often, he had not only what we were looking for, but more than we had asked for.
WITTMEYER: In fact, name any professional or amateur sporting event - golf, baseball, hockey, horse racing, basketball or football, Indy 500 races, Olympic events - and Miley will have something in his archive.
MILEY: I knew that when I retired, I would want something to do, and what better than listen to old sporting events.
WITTMEYER: And it's not just the game that's so fun for him, but listening to legendary broadcasters calling the game.
MILEY: I've had several announcers call me and say, hey, what do you have of Red Barber? Why do you want that? He said, I just want to see how he handled the broadcast.
WITTMEYER: Like this call in the 1947 World Series - the Yankees versus the Dodgers. It's Game 6. Joe DiMaggio's at bat.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RED BARBER: So the Dodgers are ahead 8 to 5. And the crowd well knows that one swing of his bat and this fellow's capable of making it a brand-new game again. Joe leans in. Outfield deep around toward left. The infield over shifted. Here's the pitch. Swung on, belted.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALL HITTING BAT)
BARBER: It's a long one. Deep to left-center. Back goes Gionfriddo. Back, back, back, back, back, back. He makes a one-handed catch against the bullpen. Oh, doctor.
(CHEERING)
MILEY: OK, there we go.
WITTMEYER: Miley leans forward in his office chair and types another name into the computer. It's Harry Caray, the broadcaster for five Major League Baseball teams. Here, he's calling the 1981 season opener between the Chicago White Sox and the Boston Red Sox.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HARRY CARAY: Yes. Holy cow. Carlton Fisk has put the White Sox ahead.
WITTMEYER: Miley typically makes trades with networks when they need a recording, and he didn't amass such an extensive collection on his own. Over the years, he worked with others to record games and hunt down things he wanted for his collection. That includes one of what he considers the greatest broadcasts of all time - the University of California versus Stanford University football game in 1982.
MILEY: With 4 seconds left to play, California took the kickoff, trailing, and they had to score a touchdown on the run back, and they started lateraling the ball. And I'm telling you, Joe Starkey, the California announcer, went absolutely crazy.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOE STARKEY: They get it back down to the 30. They're down to the 20. All the band is out on the field. He's going to go to end zone. He's going to go...
WITTMEYER: California's Golden Bears ran through the defense and even the Stanford band, which had come out onto the field early. It wasn't clear if the team's touchdown was going to count.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STARKEY: Everybody's milling around on the field. The Bears - the Bears have won. The Bears have won. Oh, my God. The most amazing, sensational, dramatic, heart-rendering, exciting, thrilling finish in the history of college football. California has won...
(CHEERING)
STARKEY: ...The big game over Stanford.
WITTMEYER: For years, Miley searched for a home for his collection after he passes away. Part of it's already at the Library of Congress. The rest will be housed at Indiana University's National Sports Journalism Center. It'll take years to move the collection and for archivists to digitize it. Eventually, the Miley collection will be available for anyone to access.
For NPR News, I'm Sara Wittmeyer in Bloomington, Indiana.
(SOUNDBITE OF RED ASTAIRE'S "IT'S GOING DOWN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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