As if it were possible for Al McCoy to be more awesome, the legend of the “Voice of the Suns" just got a bit more layered.
For those unfamiliar with how McCoy first conceived his most famous catchphrase, “Shazam,” the Hall of Fame broadcaster recently told the story on “Glendale Today.”
The history goes all the way back to when McCoy was a kid growing up in Williams, Iowa – a tiny farming community with a population in the hundreds. And like many of us, McCoy used comic books as an imaginative escape. Over the years, one superhero stuck out above the rest.
“The one I liked was Captain Marvel. He was kind of like a Superman going after all the bad guys,” McCoy said. “And a young radio reporter named Billy Batson became Captain Marvel when he said, ‘Shazam!’”
As an aspiring broadcaster himself, McCoy strongly related to the character. So a few decades later when the NBA introduced the three-point line in 1979, the young play-by-play voice had a decision to make.
“I looked at that as kind of a home run in baseball. And most baseball broadcasters have a home-run call,” McCoy said. “So I thought, ‘What can I use that might be kind of the same thing?’”
You can probably guess what happened next.
“When Captain Marvel said ‘Shazam,’ lightning and thunder and all this excitement happened,” McCoy said. “Well where did ‘Shazam’ come from? Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury.
“That’s where the first letters of ‘Shazam’ came from. So I thought, ‘Hey, this might be what I want to use.’”
And as we all know, the rest is history. What has changed, however, is the frequency at which the Suns now shoot from long distance. That first season the three-point line came into effect, Phoenix made just 68 such shots. In 2015-16, the Suns connected on 738 attempts.
“I thought initially, there would only be a few of these a game. And that first year that the NBA had the three-point shot, the average attempts were two per team,” McCoy said. “Now there’s two in the first five minutes, so maybe I pass up a ‘Shazam’ once in a while. But when one of the Suns hits a big three-point shot, they get a ‘Shazam.’”
Watch the full video below. The "Shazam" part starts at the 1:35 mark.