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Remembering Al McCoy, Part 2: Mentor, friend and jazz pianist
Over the weekend, the Phoenix Suns announced that Al McCoy, the team’s legendary radio play-by-play announcer for 51 years, had passed away at the age of 91.
Trying to eulogize such an iconic figure to the organization, the city and the fanbase at large is an impossible task, but since McCoy touched so many lives, we’re going to do our best. What follows is a collection of stories about Al McCoy — broadcaster, mentor, friend, jazz pianist and Voice of the Suns — as told by the people in the organization who knew him best.
In Part 1 on Sunday, we honored Al McCoy the broadcaster, Al McCoy the uncommon friend to Suns players, and Al McCoy the Voice of the Suns. In Part 2 today, we remember Al McCoy the mentor, friend and jazz pianist who left a lasting impression on everyone around him.
Al McCoy the mentor
In listening to people’s Al McCoy stories, one of the most common threads was how this person with such a booming voice and larger-than-life presence made people around him feel valued and seen. He was undoubtedly a mentor for so many broadcasters and journalists he worked alongside, but he made all of them feel like equals, which was even more empowering for those who grew up idolizing him.
One such childhood fan was Paul Coro, who grew up listening to McCoy’s broadcasts and eventually became The Arizona Republic‘s Suns beat writer from 2004-16.
“He’s just kind of like the soundtrack of my life,” Coro said. “We were a one-team town when I was growing up, and like every kid in the driveway, when you play one-on-none on a West Phoenix hoop and you call your own game, I wasn’t being Brent Musburger or some national guy. I was saying what Al McCoy would say, because that’s who I heard driving around town with my dad listening to a game.”
That soundtrack had an actual name and album cover for Coro. Although he was too young at the time to really remember the “Sunderella Suns” team that went to the 1976 NBA Finals, Coro grew up with a Sunderella Suns record that played all the highlights from that season. It narrated by none other than Al McCoy.
Years later, when he was a journalist on the Suns beat who frequently traveled to cover the team, Coro was able to get to know McCoy on a deeper level. The man who narrated the soundtrack to his childhood lived up to the reputation.
“It was kind of like ‘pinch me’ moments for me as a guy who grew up in Phoenix, to be in a position where Al McCoy is my friend and colleague and advisor, and he asks about my kids,” Coro said. “I just feel fortunate to grow up in a city where his voice was such a consummate professional. It helped inspire me to get into the business, and it’s just mind-blowing to wind up becoming somebody who sat by him for work, or had friendly dinners with him, or he’d asked my thoughts on the Suns.”
Coro’s journey from idolizing Al McCoy to being embraced as his peer is special, but it’s hardly unique. Numerous broadcasters have handled play-by-play for the Suns over the years, and each and every one of them has their own story about how the Voice of the Suns went out of his way to get to know them, make them feel special, and encourage them as any great mentor would.
Like Coro, Tom Leander grew up listening to McCoy’s broadcasts, but he was also a Suns ball boy. Leander was responsible for setting up the scorer’s table, which meant he got to go into the locker room to get a soda for Al McCoy. Being able to meet some of the players cultivated his love for the team, and Leander remembered how warm, friendly and intimidating it was to be in McCoy’s presence.
Flash forward a few years, and Leander revered the Voice of the Suns, listening with rapt attention as he narrated the 1976 NBA Finals.
“I used to actually listen to Al on the radio and sit at my desk when I was 12 or 13 years old, and I would keep the stats of the different players and listen to his description, and basically that was how I saw the game,” Leander said. “Most of those games were not on TV back then, and so I remember Alvan Adams’ rookie year, charting his stats in a game and just listening to Al and every call.”
As Leander pursued his own broadcasting dreams, he tried to emulate what he learned from Al McCoy and Chick Hearn. In 2003, when the Suns decided to stop doing their simulcasts that combined radio and TV broadcasts into one, Leander got his opportunity to become the team’s play-by-play TV announcer.
With McCoy going back to solely radio broadcasts, it was a situation that could’ve been awkward or uncomfortable. But Leander’s childhood hero handled it with grace, choosing instead to validate someone who had looked up to him since he was a Suns ball boy.
“He invited me into his office and said, ‘This is your time. No hard feelings,'” Leander said. “It could have been something that would have led to an uncomfortable relationship between the two of us, and in fact, it was anything but. He was always just so warm and friendly and kind.”
McCoy was a mentor to everyone who came through the broadcasting side with the Suns. Eddie Johnson knew McCoy already from his three-plus season playing for Phoenix in the late ’80s, but their relationship went to another level once EJ started calling Suns games. Johnson had done a few internships, called Phoenix Mercury games before his career was over, and even called ASU games in his first year out of retirement, but this was a different animal.
“I was like a wild colt, man, and he had to calm me down,” Johnson said. “He got me to the point where he used to point to let me know I can come in and talk. And to where our cadence and me understanding him went, he didn’t have to do that anymore.”
For his very first game as a Suns color commentator, EJ showed up with a big board full of notes, like the one Al McCoy prepared for every game. McCoy took the board and tore it up.
“He’s like, ‘You don’t need that,'” Johnson said. “And ever since then, I understood it. My job was to really describe what just happened, what was gonna happen before. It wasn’t for me to be out there regurgitating numbers. And if you listen to me in my broadcast, I rarely talk about numbers.”
EJ described himself as “cocky” when he first entered the industry, but McCoy stayed on him, continuing to push him to be better.
“I needed that,” Johnson said. “I give everything to him in regards to really, I think, just conducting my career and just drawing a diagram on how I should be an analyst and how I should operate. And so that’s why I revere him in a lot of ways. He was the reason why I think I accelerated as a broadcaster.”
Of course, not every broadcaster that Al McCoy wound up mentoring fully understood who he was from the start. When Jon Bloom first arrived in Phoenix 21 years ago, he quickly learned about the aura surrounding Al McCoy when he booked the Voice of the Suns for the Saturday morning radio show he was doing at the time. The “next level” response he got from his boss gave Bloom an early indication of McCoy’s impact on Arizona sports, and his respect only grew as he got to know McCoy better.
“A lot of people say, ‘Don’t meet your heroes,’ right?” Bloom said. “Well, in this case, don’t say that about Al McCoy, because he lived up to everything and even surpassed it with just how good of a person he is, in addition to a legendary broadcaster and all the other things that Al McCoy is.”
Perhaps Bloom’s favorite McCoy story came six or seven years ago, when the Suns were preparing for a road game in Portland later that night. Bloom was on a golf course when he got the call that McCoy wasn’t feeling well, and the Suns were offering him the chance to fill in if he could get to the airport in a matter of 1-2 hours.
The answer was “of course,” so a frazzled Jon Bloom scrambled to get to the airport on time and get to Portland. When he arrived to the hotel and went to check in with Al, he wasn’t quite prepared for how comfortable McCoy was with his friend.
“I knock on the door and he answers the door and he’s got his, uh, you know — he hadn’t gotten dressed yet, let’s put it that way,” Bloom said with a laugh. “I’m sitting in a chair waiting for him to get dressed, and we got a football game on, and he just leaves the football game on, sits down with me, and we just start talking. I’m like, ‘Okay, this is how it’s gonna be. I don’t know if it’s kind of like a Godfather situation or what was going on,’ but he was certainly comfortable!”
Once they got to the arena and it was time for Bloom to call his first ever Suns game, Al McCoy sat down right next to him as a show of support. It was also an incredibly nerve-wracking experience for Bloom.
“I really, really wanted an opportunity to call basketball games, and specifically for a team I grew up rooting for, right? I mean, it’s been 35-plus years of Suns fandom for me, so yeah, this was so important of a night for me to make a good impression, and yet this guy who everybody looks to as the voice and the legend is sitting right there to hear every word, and it was a fascinating experience. But I will tell you that I think it made every game since feel a lot easier!”
Al McCoy the friend
Ask any co-worker of Al McCoy about his genuine warmth, and they’ll have their own tale about how he went out of his way to make them feel valued, or how generous he was with his time.
Case in point: fellow Midwesterner Kevin Ray. When Ray graduated from Pittsburg State in Kansas, he moved to Flagstaff for a sports director and sales job with a local radio station that served as the Suns’ northern Arizona affiliate. McCoy introduced himself over the phone, and when the team came down to Flagstaff for training camp in the fall of 1989, he offered to take Ray to lunch.
“We immediately were, I guess, kind of kindred spirits, both being guys who grew up in the Midwest,” Ray said. “I grew up in Missouri, and so there was an immediate kind of connection between the two of us. You know, these two guys from the Midwest and getting to kind of live out our dreams. His was certainly in full force, I was still in the process of trying to achieve all my goals, but we had a great lunch, and he was gracious and welcoming and said, ‘Whatever you need for me to help out to make sure that the broadcast runs smoothly up here.'”
At the time, Ray was driving back and forth from Flagstaff to Phoenix in order to cover games before playing McCoy’s sound bites on his radio show the following morning. Ray landed a full-time job with KTAR in Phoenix in 1992, but all throughout that process, McCoy was a sounding board for Ray as he mulled different job options in-market and out of state.
Ray ultimately got married and put down roots in Phoenix. As a result, their friendship deepened over the years, until a truly memorable moment last year. During the second quarter of the Suns’ game on April 4, 2023, McCoy hopped on the TV broadcast with Kevin Ray and Eddie Johnson one last time. After years of learning from the Voice of the Suns, it was a full-circle moment for both EJ and K-Ray.
“I have a picture framed here in my office of the three of us because it did, to me, kind of signify, ‘This is a guy who helped welcome me and helped in many ways kind of open the doors to my career with the Suns,'” Ray said. “For both of us to be sitting there and he’s sitting between us, it just felt right. It felt good and felt appropriate to have him on there, so that we could say thank you, and in some way, shape or form, the fan could kind of say thank you. It was definitely a powerful moment.”
Julie Fie, the Suns’ former vice president of basketball communications, felt plenty of those moments during her four decades working in the NBA. When Fie got her first job with the Kansas City Kings, McCoy bonded with her over their mutual Iowan roots, always making a point of saying hello whenever he traveled with the team. And when Fie started working for the Suns, her office was right next to Al’s. They grew to be “extended family,” as McCoy knew Fie’s family, and vice-versa.
“I don’t know how you describe a man like Al, because he always picked you up and he said it straight with how he handled things,” Fie said. “He was kind and he was generous to everybody. That’s something that you can just see it close up, you can see it from far away that he was, I would say, besides being a co-worker, he was my friend.”
Even after Fie left the organization in 2022, they continued to keep in touch, regularly meeting up for lunches and frequent check-ins over the phone.
“When we were in the summertime, we always made a point, like once a week, if I went on vacation, he’d called and say, ‘How’s vacation?'” Fie said. “If I was back in Iowa, he’d call and say, ‘Okay, where’s the corn at today?’ He always kept up with everything.”
Whether you were with the Suns organization for 30 years like Julie Fie or five years like Steve Albert, everyone had their favorite personal interactions with Al McCoy. For Albert, a few came to mind.
Albert spent years as a broadcaster for the New Jersey Nets and Golden State Warriors prior to joining the Suns, so he and Al McCoy had exchanged pleasantries before. McCoy also knew Albert’s brothers, broadcasters Marv Albert and Al Albert, so the two knew each other relatively well before Steve Albert got the Suns job and moved to Phoenix.
The first time Albert came down to the then US Airways Center after getting the job, McCoy proceeded to introduce him to almost every single member of the organization, going from cubicle to cubicle throughout the entire office complex. Albert was in awe.
“As Al escorted me around, he identified every person by name,” Albert recalled. “I mean, it was uncanny. I said to myself, ‘This guy has a superhuman memory! I have to find out his secret.'”
When they had finally finished their meet-and-greet with the entire franchise, Albert got his chance.
“I said to him, ‘Al, this was absolutely unbelievable! You knew everyone’s name, how could you possibly pull that off?’ He looked at me and said in his familiar, dulcet tones, ‘Steve…each desk had a name plate.'”
Albert blamed his gaffe on the heat, but it spoke volumes about the welcoming presence that McCoy had. Not long after Albert arrived, McCoy invited him to his favorite Italian restaurant and introduced him to the owners there as well. Every restaurant they went to, it felt like Al McCoy knew the owners, and every time, he introduced Steve Albert to help him feel like part of his new community.
“Boy, when I hooked up with the Suns as their TV announcer, it was Al on steroids in terms of the help that he provided me,” Albert said. “It was more than just a comrade in arms, a colleague, a fellow announcer; he just immediately became my best friend in Phoenix, and it wasn’t an act. It was really from the heart.”
Albert had moved to Phoenix by himself, but McCoy’s family embraced him as one of their own too. When the two discovered they shared a birthday (April 26th), McCoy started inviting Albert to join him and his family at their favorite Italian restaurants for dinner. They became Albert’s adoptive family, and McCoy was like a third brother.
On off days, Albert and McCoy would go each other’s houses to watch a game, or they’d frequent a local delicatessen called Chompie’s and talk about Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, or one of Al’s favorite topics, Johnny Carson. When Albert got a dog years later, he wound up naming her Chompie.
Chompie’s wasn’t the only place where Al McCoy ate well. After spending decades traveling to different cities, McCoy knew all the best restaurants to hit on the road. In Minnesota, the go-to spot was Murray’s, a classic steakhouse in Minneapolis. Murray’s was only a 10-minute walk away from the hotel where Albert and McCoy were staying, but on one trip — when the temperature was 10 degrees below zero — that presented a problem. The two weren’t exactly equipped for inclement weather.
“Coming from Phoenix, you might say, we weren’t dressed appropriately for the frigid temperatures,” Albert laughed. “We had overcoats, but for this climate, you needed a really heavy jacket. Also a dog sled of huskies wouldn’t have hurt, and throw in a St. Bernard and a hot toddy.”
Despite their lack of proper attire, they decided to brave the cold anyway, knowing they wouldn’t get another chance to enjoy a steak from Murray’s for a long while. After they had finished their meal, they debated calling a three-minute taxi ride, but thought better of it. And it was then that Al McCoy left Steve Albert in awe once again.
“We put out our grossly under-prepared outerwear and began our trip back to the hotel,” Albert recounted. “Now Al — in his mid-80s at the time — took off like Usain Bolt. He was a blur, and by the time I finally caught up with him, he was waiting for me in the lobby of our hotel. I mean, I’m talking minutes later. I didn’t know what had happened to him! I thought he took a wrong turn or was frozen to a lamppost somewhere. He raced all the way back in what had to be record time for a play-by-play announcer in sub-zero weather.”
McCoy was often a man of surprises, and numerous co-workers attested to how popular he was on the road. Fans would often approach him, but he always made time to speak with each and every one of them.
“He was incredible with every fan who would come up and talk to him, and everybody has an Al McCoy personal story to share that he heard thousands of times,” Paul Coro said. “But he made every person feel special and acknowledge them when they would want to come up and share it with him and take a picture or sign an autograph or whatever. He treated all those people just the same as he did the first one decades ago, probably.”
Al McCoy’s fans weren’t just Suns fans either. According to Tom Ambrose, who spent 37 years working on the PR side and for Suns Charities, when McCoy called the 1975 NBA All-Star Game — the first All-Star game of any kind to take place in Phoenix — he was joined on the call by his friend and fellow legendary broadcaster, Chick Hearn. Hearn called the first quarter before giving McCoy a glowing intro leading into the second quarter. It’s something that Ambrose believes McCoy memorized word-for-word.
National broadcasters similarly revered McCoy and flocked to him when he came to town. Tom Leander saw the respect firsthand when legends like Mike Breen, Mike Tirico and Marv Albert would go out of their way to say hello to Al McCoy.
“These guys all immediately would go to Al McCoy just to shake his hand, say hello and also they’d share some information about the team,” Leander said. “That is just so special to have that respect from all the other broadcasters and friendship too. We would go to the NBA broadcast meetings in New York, and everybody wanted to hang out with Al ’cause he’s just such a cool dude, and hopefully at some point he was gonna step behind the piano and start playing at one of the piano bars.”
Al McCoy the jazz pianist
Yes, you read that right. Before Al McCoy carved out his career as a legendary NBA broadcaster, he actually was territorial pianist in his youth, playing with big bands and small groups. So whenever the Suns hit the road, any hotel or bar that had a piano in it became a different kind of arena for McCoy.
“If it was a piano anywhere in the hotel or whatever, as a player I saw him do it, and then as a broadcaster,” Eddie Johnson said. “His voice is deep too, so yeah, if he didn’t broadcast for a living, he could have probably been an entertainer. Without a doubt.”
The sight of McCoy sliding behind a piano was always a surprise to those who weren’t aware of his jazz background, but it never seemed to get old.
“Walked in, little hotel bar, and there he was, tickling the ivory, and just had captivated the room,” Kevin Ray said. “There was probably 20, 30 people in there, and Al is just sitting behind the piano and looking as comfortable there as he did behind the mic. And I was like, ‘Wow.’ I mean, talk about talent.”
On one memorable occasion back in the ’80s, the Suns were in Prescott for training camp, and it was coach John MacLeod’s birthday. The team had gathered all the players and personnel upstairs at a bar on Whiskey Row to hold a celebration for MacLeod, when they heard a piano getting ready to play “Happy Birthday” from the hallway.
“Suddenly these double doors burst open, and there are two guys pushing the piano and one guy pushing Al McCoy on a stool,” Tom Ambrose said. “And they’re sliding across the room, and Al’s not missing a beat playing ‘Happy Birthday’ for John MacLeod, and everybody breaks into the song and it was a hoot. But he could even play on the move!”
In Phoenix, Al McCoy loved to frequent local jazz clubs. Near his home, he would visit the Glendale GasLight Inn, which is where he took Steve Albert early on when Albert first moved to Phoenix.
“I didn’t realize how good he was, he was terrific,” Albert said. “It was a joy to listen to him and to hear him play. And then he’d come back to the table and continue eating like it was nothing. He wasn’t boastful about it or anything like that. It was just part of Al.”
McCoy also liked to visit a jazz club in downtown Phoenix called — fittingly enough — The Nash. McCoy became friends with the co-founder of The Nash, Joel Goldenthal, back in the ’80s. Goldenthal was performing at a local Phoenix restaurant called Timothy’s at the time, and the two bonded over their mutual love of jazz.
As time went on, Goldenthal and his wife, vocalist Delphine Cortez, would perform at the Glendale GasLight Inn as well. Every time Al McCoy would come in with his late wife, Georgia, they would play “Georgia” for her.
According to Goldenthal, McCoy advocated for Jazz in Arizona — the parent organization of The Nash — to Suns Charities. And when the Suns inducted McCoy into their Ring of Honor in 2017, the legendary broadcaster gave The Nash an incredible gift.
Whenever the Suns inducted a new member into the Ring of Honor, former owner Robert Sarver would gift the honoree something special the pertained to their interests. For example, when Tom Chambers was inducted, he was gifted a horse and saddle.
Knowing about McCoy’s talents as a pianist and love for jazz, Sarver decided to gift him a Steinway Yamaha C7X grand piano. There was just one problem.
“Al said, ‘Thank you very much,’ but it’s like, ‘What the hell am I gonna do with it? It’s so big, I can’t get it in my house!'” Tom Ambrose said.
At that point, McCoy had a better idea of what to do with it.
“Al McCoy called me, it was on a Saturday,” Joel Goldenthal recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t know whether you saw the media coverage and so forth, but last night, I was presented with this Steinway piano, and I don’t really need it. I would like it to be given to The Nash.’ So he went to Sarver and the powers that be and asked that the gift be redirected to The Nash. So that’s what happened.”
It took a year before that transaction went through, but it’s the same grand piano that’s been stage at The Nash since 2018, and it will remain on stage once they finish remodeling soon. A plaque with Al McCoy standing next to the donated piano still hangs there in the lobby.
“That’s the way he was,” Goldenthal said. “He really cares, and he’s not for show. He’s just very substantive, warm and he’s one of these people that, when he comes into your life, he’s just kind of a larger-than-life figure.”
Al McCoy’s enduring legacy
Ask anyone who knew Al McCoy well enough, and they’ll rattle off a dozen different stories that contain common threads: He was warm, knowledgeable, generous with his time and made the people around him feel valued. He was consistent, prepared, and he cared.
“Al McCoy definitely is that man of character, and to have had the opportunity to work with him was always a thrill for me,” Ann Meyers Drysdale said. “Certainly he has impressed so many different people just because of the guy he is and those Iowa roots for him, but he’s always given back to so many people.”
“He was what we call a mensch, just a class act,” Albert added. “We were quite a few years apart in age, but he became like my buddy.”
When longtime Arizona Diamondbacks radio broadcaster Greg Schulte retired last year, he told PHNX Sports’ Jesse Friedman that McCoy would listen to every single one of Schulte’s calls, and then he’d call every now and then to talk about the D-backs. Former Suns beat writers Bob Young, Matt Petersen and Gina Mizell shared their own similarly touching stories about how he uplifted them and others around him.
“Being a Midwest guy myself, we always consider ourselves warm, welcoming individuals and people who always try to see the good in others,” Kevin Ray said. “That’s what I saw from Al, especially the more that I realized what an absolutely iconic figure he was. But he was always so gracious to people when they would see him, talk to him, ask him for an autograph or a picture, and I think that’s the way his broadcasts carried themselves. And that’s why people felt such a warming, welcoming voice with Al. It felt like a family member.”
If that were the case, McCoy had perhaps the biggest “family” of anyone in Phoenix. Julie Fie referred to him as the “pinnacle of what anybody that’s in broadcasting strives to be,” but perhaps just as important is how he connected an entire city and fanbase over five decades.
“If you walked down the street with him or you walked in a restaurant, everybody knows Al,” Fie said. “And it’s wonderful, when you’re in Phoenix, everybody knows Al and everybody has a story where they were when something happened. I mean, what a special thing. If you grew up here, then you probably have a story too, that he called some game that you were listening to.”
No one will ever be able to fill Al McCoy’s shoes as the Voice of the Suns. But Jon Bloom and the fellow broadcasters who were able to work with him and learn from him over the years are committed to carrying on that legacy by sharing his story.
“If you think about longevity and being able to do something that has value and has impact, I challenge you to find anyone who has accomplished more in that realm,” Bloom said. “His value and his impact will continue for decades and generations after his career came to an end, and I just feel like, to have a legacy like that is so unique. It should be cherished.”
During that halftime speech of his final regular-season game, Al McCoy boomed into the mic that “51 years had slid by, and it’s been a great ride.” When Steve Albert last spoke to his friend, McCoy echoed those words, saying, “I’ve had a great life.”
No one will ever be able to singlehandedly explain what the Voice of the Suns meant to the city of Phoenix, but that message from Al McCoy himself may have been the biggest understatement of them all.
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