NEW YORK -- Sometime this weekend, maybe Friday night, maybe Sunday, ESPN's Athletes of the Century countdown will get to Babe Ruth. And included in the opening of the profile will be newly discovered archival film of the 1932 called shot home run.

Ruth is in the final four of the countdown with Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Michael Jordan. Profiles of the No. 4 and No. 3 athletes will be shown on ESPN on Friday, with No. 2 and No. 1 scheduled for Sunday afternoon on ABC.

When the project began, ESPN and ESPN.com asked for any archival film that viewers might have of the likely candidates.

And that was how Mark Shapiro, coordinating producer of the series, fell into this treasure trove of film -- Ruth's called shot homer in the 1932 World Series.

"For a year, we've tried to uncover everything we can and then, right at the end, to get a call like this with never-before-seen footage, it's the perfect culmination of the series," Shapiro said.

The new film was shot by a man named Harold Warp, who was not a passionate baseball fan and attended just one game in his life -- Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. He shot home movies of the event and they became part of a collection shown at the annual family reunion.

It was no big deal for the family, a curiosity more than anything else, until Warp's great nephew, James Jacobs, came across it. "I thought that it was pretty neat, Ruth and Lou Gehrig at Wrigley Field," he said.

Jacobs did some research and learned that Ruth played just two games at Wrigley. After consulting the Hall of Fame and the Society for American Baseball Research, it turned out that the long lost footage was of the called shot.

Shapiro sent a courier for the film and did his own authentication. "It's eerie," he said. "It's unbelievable. It's the first film on record of Ruth hitting the ball out of the park. Everybody in the park is in suits and hats."

The only other film of the game is owned by Kirk Kandle of St. Louis, already being used in the ESPN profile. "The interesting part is he always wanted to see the ball go out and Ruth rounding third base and scoring," Shapiro said. "He missed it because a guy stood up in front of him.

Nobody stood up in front of Harold Warp.