Sports
Recorded History: Vin Scully Calls a Koufax MilestoneNPR Morning Edition, April 23, 2007 ·
There were three mainstays for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960s: Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale on the pitcher's mound, and Vin Scully in the broadcaster's booth.
On June 30, 1962, with the Dodgers facing the New York Mets, Koufax pitched the first of his four career no-hitters. Until recently, no one knew Scully's call of that game had been recorded.
"The Dodger broadcasts back then weren't archived," says Mark Langill, the team's historian.
There was a copy of the September 1965 broadcast of the Dodgers-Cubs game in which Koufax pitched his final no-hitter — and a perfect game.
"When he retired the first 24 batters against the Cubs in '65, Vin Scully called into the studio and said, 'Let's make a recording,'" Langill tells Renee Montagne.
But such wasn't the case three years earlier when Scully, who has been broadcasting Dodgers games since 1950, was calling Koufax's first no-hitter.
"This was so unheard of, when we first thought that it could exist, there's just no way that there's a recording of this because it would have surfaced after all these years," Langill says.
But thanks to Jim Governale, who is a broadcaster himself in Los Angeles for Talk Radio KKLA, a tape of the game has come to light.
Governale's uncle, 14 at the time of the 1962 Dodgers-Mets game, was tinkering with a reel-to-reel machine when he decided to record the game from the radio.
"I think he could kind of sense history in the making listening to the Dodgers game," Governale says.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9752592click link for rest of story plus photos and audio clip
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