Texas Western's historic win in the '66 NCAA Tournament championship game over Kentucky "has rarely if ever been seen on television since its original broadcast," but it will be "seen again" Wednesday night on ESPN, according to Richard Sandomir of the N.Y. TIMES. It was "quite easy for ESPN to acquire the rights to the game because the NCAA is good about historic preservation." Media company Wazee Digital "maintains and licenses an archive whose oldest men's tournament film highlights" from the '39 Oregon-Ohio State championship game. ESPN’s broadcast of Texas Western-Kentucky will "be augmented with commentary" by John Saunders, Jay Bilas and Michael Wilbon, but they will "not speak during the rebroadcast." That approach was "criticized when NFL Network recently let its announcers speak over NFL Films's restitching of its footage of Super Bowl I." The original black-and-white broadcast "is a little bleached out," but it "is intact." The game marked the first time a team starting five black players won the NCAA title (N.Y. TIMES, 3/28).
