Editing Al McCoy (sportscaster) (section)

===Education and early career===
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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 (music)|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.<ref name="McCoy's-Book" />
[[File:1954-yearbooks 21986 full.png|thumb|Al McCoy graduated from Drake University in 1954.]]
Also during his freshman year his first job in radio was at [[KZWC|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 "[[broadcasting|on-air]]" talent and moved to production staff.<ref name="McCoy's-Book" />  

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.<ref name="McCoy's-Book" />  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, AZ|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<ref name="WHO-2007-07">{{cite episode|title=July 15, 2007|series=Two Guys Named Jim|url=http://whoradio.com/pages/twoguysnamedjim.html|station=[[WHO (AM)]]|location=Des Moines, Iowa|airdate=2007-07-15|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080907193814/http://www.whoradio.com/pages/twoguysnamedjim.html|archive-date=September 7, 2008}}</ref> and {{asof|2007|lc=y}} was still a frequent guest on "Two Guys Named Jim"—a sports-talk show on WHO.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://whoradio.com/pages/twoguysnamedjim.html |title=Two Guys Named Jim|date= July 1, 2007|url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080907193814/http://www.whoradio.com/pages/twoguysnamedjim.html |archive-date= September 7, 2008 }}</ref>  He would eventually move from Iowa City, to [[WBMX|WJJD]] in [[Chicago]], to [[WHLD]] in Niagara Falls where he commenced broadcasting a “[[Steve Allen]]-type” [[piano]]-meets-[[radio personality|disc jockey]] show for [[Buffalo, New York]] that was rejected by WHO.  Three weeks after moving to [[Niagara Falls, New York|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, CA|San Francisco]] as their [[Triple-A (baseball)|Triple-A]] [[farm team]] moved to [[Phoenix, Arizona]].<ref name="ESPN-Death"/> 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 (vehicle)|trailer]] attached to his '54 [[Ford Motor Company|Ford]] with no [[air conditioning]], headed [[southwest]] in the [[summer]] of 1958.