Courtesy the Oklahoman

(March 11, 2011) The Library of Congress has acquired a huge archive of pre-1972 sports recordings that include broadcaster Curt Gowdy announcing University of Oklahoma football and basketball games.
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The Library of Congress announced Wednesday it had acquired the so-called Miley Collection — more than 6,000 radio and television broadcast recordings collected by sports enthusiast John Miley. The recordings, spanning professional and amateur sports, were made between 1920 and 1972.

Among them, according to a news release, are recordings of Gowdy covering OU football and basketball. Gowdy, a member of the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame, was sports director at KOMA radio in Oklahoma City from 1946-49 before moving on to national fame.

Other recordings in the collection:

→Wilt Chamberlain’s last game at Kansas

→Arnold Palmer winning his first professional tournament in 1955

→Southern Methodist University’s near upset of Notre Dame in 1949.

The recordings will be cataloged, digitally preserved and made available in the Library’s reading rooms on Capitol Hill; they also will be available on the Library’s website at some point.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said the Library “now will be able to ensure the archival preservation of a collection that substantially documents the historical record of the nation’s sports broadcast history before 1972, when sound recordings were not protected by federal copyright law.”

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