Allen Leonard McCoy (April 26, 1933 – September 21, 2024) was an American sportscaster who was the play-by-play announcer for the Phoenix Suns of the National Basketball Association from 1972 to 2023. The 2022–23 NBA season was his 51st and final season. He is the longest-tenured broadcaster in NBA history.
Along with Chick Hearn, Hot Rod Hundley and Kevin Calabro, he was among the last of NBA broadcasters to have been simulcast on both television and radio, before league-officials ended the practice in the mid-2000's and McCoy's broadcasts became exclusive to radio and online streaming via the Suns Radio Network.
His fast-paced, classical broadcasting style coupled with his colorful use of catchphrase to distinguish plays has proven influential to a generation of sportscasters, such as lead NBA on ABC play-by-play announcer Mike Breen, who remarked of McCoy as "one of my heroes" during live ESPN coverage of the 2021 Western Conference Finals. Steve Albert said "I put him up there with Vin Scully and Ernie Harwell, and all the greats, all the legends."
McCoy is a Curt Gowdy Media Award winner and a member of the Phoenix Suns Ring of Honor. Despite these accolades, The Arizona Republic would later detail the circumstances leading to his forced displacement to the back of the Suns arena upon his final season, after 50 previous seasons on the floor next to the Suns players' bench in a courtside spot once-named "the best seat in the house" in his own Ring of Honor speech. The Arizona Republic also published a photo gallery showing 90-year-old Al McCoy walking up the long flights of concrete steps to the higher arena location Suns personnel moved him to finish his career.
Early life McCoy was born on April 26, 1933, Williams, Iowa. He grew up on a farm outside the area with no electricity or running water throughout his early childhood. To entertain himself as a boy on the farm, he would often read comic books or listen to his family's battery-powered radio.
At an early age, he became interested in both the local and nationally-syndicated sportscasts picked up through the area's AM radio frequencies. The sounds of broadcasters like Bert Wilson, Don Dunphy, Bill Stern, along with Pat Flanagan, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray, would inspire his interest in sports and broadcasting. As a boy, he would sometimes prop himself on the farm's fence posts and broadcast fantasy play-by-play for a crowd of the family's pigs and cattle, imagining himself at Chicago Stadium, Madison Square Garden or Boston Garden.
In 1945, he attended the World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers. In the fall of 1948, he attended his first National Basketball Association (then-known as the National Basketball League) game as the Waterloo Hawks hosted league-MVP Don Otten's Tri-Cities Black Hawks, and would soon witness George Mikan play in-person during another game in Waterloo. He continued to scan the radio dial every night to hear the Joe Louis big boxing fights of the era, Cubs broadcasts, national football, basketball, or any and every other sport he could get tuned through his receiver. Concurrently, as an active youth with a basketball hoop now-propped up in a tree on the farm, he made the starting line-up of his high-school basketball team for three seasons, playing the position of point-guard. His high school Coach Chuck Lovin remembered McCoy as a "good shot" who was "intense" about everything he did in high school, from athletics to school plays.
Around the same span of time, at the age of 14, he began playing jazz piano in a variety of local and touring small-piece and big bands at local area dances in the midwest-territory for extra income, a side-gig he would continue throughout college that would routinely have him home by 2.a.m. for 7 a.m. classes. One memorable night, he played as a sideman to famed jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge, who remembered and recognized him immediately upon their second meeting many years later, as McCoy attended a concert alongside Al Bianchi & John MacLeod following a Phoenix Suns game.
Education and early career
He attended Drake University, majoring in Drama-Speech and minoring in Broadcast Journalism.
Drake University did not formally offer a radio or broadcast major at the time, so McCoy signed up for as many radio classes as he could. During his first year of classes he begged his professor, the head of the radio department and Drake Relays announcer Jim Duncan to let him borrow a university tape recorder so he could demo his play-by-play during a campus basketball game. Assuring McCoy it could wait until his junior or senior year, Professor Duncan relented after weeks of McCoy's ongoing persistence. Dropping his recording off early the next morning and eager for his professor's critique, he waited another couple weeks until finally being called into Duncan's office, who now demanded to know how long McCoy had been calling basketball games. Impressed by the level of detail in his first play-by-play recording, Duncan became McCoy's early supporter and mentor from that date forward.
Also during his freshman year his first job in radio was at KJFJ in Webster City, Iowa, and he was soon hired by WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, working the night shift where was subsequently told by the person who hired him that he did not have a future in broadcasting, demoted from "on-air" talent and moved to production staff.
Shaken by the experience, but undeterred from following his childhood dreams, McCoy left WHO for smaller family-run station KWDM to strengthen his play-by-play for a variety of different sports. Amidst transition, he first encountered Chick Hearn, then-broadcaster for Bradley University, at a Bradley-Drake basketball game. The two would remain friends until Hearn's death in 2002, buying each other dinner when either were in Phoenix or Los Angeles for their future respective NBA teams, often reminiscing on their early days broadcasting in the midwest. McCoy would later credit Hearn along with Marty Glickman as “blazing the trial” for basketball broadcasters in his Naismith Hall of Fame speech.
In 1954 McCoy graduated from Drake. Testing his luck out west where some of his relatives had relocated, he spent a summer looking for radio work in Phoenix, Arizona and later Denver, Colorado. In both locations he found could not even land a single job interview and played piano to support himself, before applying for a graduate assistantship at the University of Iowa.
During and following the year of graduate school McCoy ran the gamut of employers, bouncing around more local Iowa stations like KXIC where he kept area connections and was still a frequent guest on "Two Guys Named Jim"—a sports-talk show on WHO. He would eventually move from Iowa City, to WJJD in Chicago, to WHLD in Niagara Falls where he commenced broadcasting a “Steve Allen-type” piano-meets-disc jockey show for Buffalo, New York that was rejected by WHO. Three weeks after moving to Niagara Falls amidst a decade of constant transition and upheaval, he found stability in the form of Georgia Shahinian, born Koharig Shahinian, meeting her at a birthday party for a mutual friend. The two soon found themselves inseparable, and quickly became a daily part of each other's lives.
As his radio contract in Buffalo was set to expire, McCoy got a tip from New York Giants play-by-play broadcaster Russ Hodges that the team would be relocating to San Francisco as their Triple-A farm team moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Both men felt McCoy had a good shot of securing the job. With major life decisions to be made quickly, Georgia & Al McCoy were soon wed, hitching their lives on a trailer attached to his '54 Ford with no air conditioning, headed southwest in the summer of 1958.
Early Phoenix career After getting married, Al & Georgia McCoy moved to Phoenix, AZ in the summer of 1958. He was soon hired by KOOL, scheduled broadcaster for the Phoenix Giants, and he worked as the host of night-time radio shows for the station until the team completed their own move to the west coast.
With the Phoenix Giants, McCoy broadcast the only baseball game in history to be postponed due to grasshoppers, who collectively gathered around all the surrounding sources of light and placed the ball park in a shroud of darkness. McCoy described exiting the ball park grounds as “like driving around in snow. There'd be a drift of grasshoppers in the street. you'd start sliding around.”
McCoy was occasionally visited during Phoenix Giants broadcasts by then-San Francisco Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who often told McCoy he would become the next “Voice of the Giants” in Major League Baseball. When the job was eventually offered, talk of a potential move of the team away from the west coast caused McCoy to decline, believing it to not be the “right fit.” During another period in time when the Giants job was again presented, McCoy briefly contemplated broadcasting both Suns and Giants games, planning to make a decision later, but was ultimately glad he did not. He would eventually one day fill-in as play-by-play for the San Francisco Giants for one single game, during a night the Suns were not playing.
The Triple-A team would also eventually leave Phoenix for Tacoma, WA due to a dispute over construction of a new ball park, while McCoy remained in Phoenix. Once the park was built, the team returned. In the interim five years without the Phoenix Giants, McCoy became "One of the Good Guys", a DJ on KRUX 1360 AM. While on KRUX in the 1960s he also did play-by-play for ASU Sun Devil's football and basketball. On local television stations KTVK and KTAR-TV, he did ring announcing work for boxing fights held at Phoenix Madison Square Garden, and also some professional wrestling commentary for the regional territory.
McCoy parted ways with the Phoenix Giants three years after their return to Phoenix in 1966. He would eventually return to baseball some 32-years later with the Arizona Diamondbacks during the club's first season in 1998, paired with Joe Garagiola.
As the Western Hockey League expanded to Arizona in 1967, McCoy also began broadcasting for the Phoenix Roadrunners during the Giants' off-season. Less experienced with hockey, McCoy served as a color-commentator for two seasons before learning to do play-by-play for the ice on-the-fly after his broadcaster partner Jim Wells fell through a shower door. McCoy found he enjoyed doing hockey play-by-play, and Wells' agreed that it would be a better fit if they switched roles after his recovery.
As his ongoing commitments to the Phoenix Giants, the Phoenix Roadrunners and other radio stations transitioned, he began to observe a “buzz” in the city over a potential new NBA expansion team and quickly made inroads to secure a job with the new franchise as it was officially announced in 1968.
The Voice of the Suns Al McCoy served as the play-by-play "Voice of the Phoenix Suns" for 51 consecutive seasons, or every season excluding the first four years of franchise existence. He became a fixture of Phoenix media and local pop-culture as the central broadcaster for the Phoenix Suns on both radio and television until 2003, when Suns TV and Suns radio became separate media. McCoy continued to broadcast on the Suns Radio Network through the 2022-23 NBA season.
For 50 consecutive seasons (barring remote broadcasts during the pandemic) his official arena broadcast location had been stationed courtside, adjacent to the Suns players' home bench, as recent as May 2022. He stopped broadcasting road games in 2019 due to difficult vantage points at higher locations in other NBA arenas.
On October 2, 2022, his home broadcast location was moved higher up in the Suns arena, just beneath the skyboxes in the Footprint Center.
The NBA arrives in Phoenix (1966–1972)