Al McCoy, who called Suns games on the radio for more than a half-century, has died at 91

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Al McCoy, who called Suns games on the radio for more than a half-century, has died at 91

2024-09-22 06:38 Last Updated At：06:40

PHOENIX (AP) — Al McCoy, who was the radio voice of the Phoenix Suns for more than a half-century, has died. He was 91.

The team made the announcement on Saturday and released a statement from his family. No cause of death was disclosed.

McCoy was the longest-tenured team broadcaster in NBA history, calling Suns games for 51 years. He called his first game on his Sept. 27, 1972 and his last on May 11, 2023. His tenure included Phoenix's NBA Finals appearances in 1976, 1993 and 2021.

“This is a sad day for the Suns and the Suns family," former Suns star Charles Barkley said in a statement. "Al McCoy represented everything that is great about Phoenix, the Phoenix Suns and people who love basketball. I was blessed and honored to work with Al and I’m gonna miss him.”

McCoy is a member of the franchise's Ring of Honor and a 2009 inductee into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. He also earned the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007.

McCoy was born in 1933 in Williams, Iowa, and got his first radio job in 1951 in Webster City, Iowa, when he was a freshman at Drake. He moved to Arizona in 1956 as the play-by-play announced for the Triple-A Phoenix Giants baseball team. During his tenure with the Suns, he became known for his catchphrases such as “Shazam,” “Zing Go the Strings” and “Heartbreak Hotel.”

“I had the privilege of Al McCoy narrating the first eight years of my career," Suns star Devin Booker said. "He was inducted into the Ring of Honor my second season, and it was then I really understood what a special talent he was. And over the course of my career, I’ve learned what an even more special person he was.

"We will miss Al, and I am so glad our legacies in Phoenix are forever connected.”

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New Zealand's Parliament will debate suspending Māori lawmakers who performed a protest haka

2025-05-15 11:55 Last Updated At：12:01

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A New Zealand parliamentary committee has recommended the unprecedented suspensions of three Māori lawmakers for performing a protest haka in the debating chamber last year.

The haka is a chanting dance of challenge of great cultural importance in New Zealand, and the three lawmakers from Te Pāti Māori, the Māori party, performed one to oppose a controversial bill that would have redefined the country’s founding document.

A committee Wednesday recommended record suspensions and severe censure — the harshest penalties ever assigned to New Zealand parliamentarians — after finding the trio in contempt of Parliament.

Government bloc lawmakers, who hold the majority, are expected to endorse the penalties in a vote Tuesday. But Parliament’s Speaker Gerry Brownlee took the unusual step Thursday of saying he would first allow unlimited debate before the vote due to the severity of the proposed punishments.

The recommendations were the latest twist in the fraught saga over the bill, now defeated, that opponents said would have provoked constitutional havoc and reversed decades of progress for Māori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people.

Video of the legislators in full cry drew global attention last November. The bill they opposed was vanquished at a second vote in April.

However, some lawmakers from the center-right government objected to the Māori Party legislators’ protest during the first vote and complained to parliament’s speaker. At issue was the way the trio walked across the floor of the debating chamber towards their opponents while they performed the haka.

“It is not acceptable to physically approach another member on the floor of the debating chamber,” Wednesday’s report said, adding that the behavior could be considered intimidating. The committee denied the legislators were being punished for the haka, which is a beloved and sacred cultural institution in New Zealand life, but “the time at and manner in which it was performed” during a vote, according to the findings.

The committee deciding the fate of the lawmakers has members from all political parties. The government’s opponents disagreed with parts or all of the decision but were overruled.

“This was a very serious incident, and the likes of which I have never seen before in my 23 years in the debating chamber,” said the committee's chair, Judith Collins.

The three legislators didn’t appear before the committee when summoned in April because they said Parliament doesn’t respect Māori cultural protocol and they wouldn’t get a fair hearing.

“The process was grossly unjust, unfair, and unwarranted, resulting in an extreme sanction,” Māori party spokesperson and lawmaker Mariameno Kapa-Kingi said in a statement. “This was not about process, this became personal.”

The report recommended that Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, who at 22 is New Zealand’s youngest lawmaker, be suspended from Parliament for seven days. The co-leaders of her political party, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, face 21-day bans.

Three days is the longest a lawmaker has been barred from the House before. Suspended legislators are not paid during their bans.

Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer, the leaders of the party that advocates Māori rights and holds six of Parliament’s 123 seats, have lambasted the committee’s process as intolerant of Māori principles and identity.

The pair received more severe sanctions than Maipi-Clarke because the younger lawmaker had written a letter of “contrition” to the committee, the report said.

The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill sought to redefine New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 pact between the British Crown and Māori leaders signed during New Zealand’s colonization.

The English and Māori language versions of the treaty differed, and the Crown immediately began to breach both, resulting in mass land thefts and generations of disenfranchisement for Māori, who remain disadvantaged on almost every metric. But in recent decades, Māori protest movements have wrought growing recognition of the Treaty’s promises in New Zealand’s law, politics and public life.

That produced billion-dollar land settlements with tribes and strategies to advance Indigenous language and culture. Such policies were the target of the bill, drawn up by a minor libertarian party who denounced what they said was special treatment for Māori as they tried to rewrite the treaty's promises.