[msb-alumni] Billy Packer, Analyst With Keen Mind and Pungent Style, Dies at 82 on January 26, 2023
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <msb-alumni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2023 17:18:29 -0500
BlankBilly Packer, Analyst With Keen Mind and Pungent Style, Dies at 82. By
Richard
Sandomir.
With partners on NBC and then CBS, and with a rapid, opinionated style, he was
heard during
every N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament from 1975 to 2008.
Billy Packer, the sharp-eyed, opinionated lead college basketball analyst for
NBC and CBS
whose commentary was heard during every Final Four game of the N.C.A.A. men's
basketball
tournament from 1975 to 2008, died on Thursday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 82.
His son Brandt
said the cause was kidney failure.
A former point guard and assistant coach at Wake Forest University, Mr. Packer
began as a
broadcast analyst in the early 1970s as the men's tournament, and especially
the Final Four,
became the signature sports event known as March Madness. He took to the
national stage
easily with a fast-talking, straightforward style and opinions that provoked
strong feelings
among fans. 'He had the ability to make every fan base feel he was against
them, and he
relished that role,' Jim Nantz, who became Mr. Packer's partner at CBS Sports
in 1991, said
in a phone interview on Friday. 'He wore the black hat better than anyone I'd
ever seen. He
added: 'North Carolina thought he was in the bag for Duke. Duke thought he was
pro-North
Carolina. He loved it. At NBC Sports, Mr. Packer worked with Dick Enberg and Al
McGuire, a
former coach at Marquette University, forming one of the most popular
announcing teams in
sports. Mr. Packer and Mr. McGuire had different views not just of basketball
but also of
the world, and they played off each other well, with Mr. Enberg acting as the
straight man.
Their partnership broke up in 1981, when the tournament's television rights
were acquired by
CBS. Switching networks, Mr. Packer worked with several partners, including
Brent Musburger
and Mr. Nantz, with whom he stayed until he retired in 2008. Mr. Packer was
largely serious
on the air, without any schtick, unlike ESPN's exuberant Dick Vitale; he stuck
instead to
X's and O's and strategy, with a healthy dose of opinion about the game he was
watching and
the state of college basketball. 'The poor guy is so serious about basketball
that he can't
have any fun with it,' Mr. McGuire once said. 'It's all life or death. There's
no in-between
with Billy. If it's on his mind, it jumps out of his mouth. But bless his
heart, his mind is
just as fast as his mouth. In 2004, Mr. Packer excoriated St. Joseph's
University as a No. 1
seed in its region in the N.C.A.A. tournament. The next year, he criticized
N.C.A.A.
officials for choosing some mid-major conference teams for the tournament while
excluding
teams from larger conferences that he deemed better. More problematic was the
time in 1996
when he called the Georgetown University guard Allen Iverson, who is Black, a
'tough little
monkey. He apologized on the air, saying he had not intended the comment to be
racial. 'Al
Capone was a tough monkey,' he said. 'Mike Ditka was a tough monkey. Bobby
Hurley was a
tough monkey. In 2000, he snapped at two female students who were checking
press passes at
Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium, saying, according to news reports, 'Since when
do we let
women control who gets into a men's basketball game? He later apologized.
Anthony William
Paczkowski was born on Feb. 25, 1940, in Wellsville, N.Y., near the
Pennsylvania border, and
moved to Bethlehem, Pa., where his father, also named Anthony, was hired to
coach the Lehigh
University men's basketball team. The elder Mr. Packer changed the family name
soon
afterward. Billy's mother, Lois (Cruikshank) Packer, was a homemaker. Billy
played guard at
Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and led the team to two Atlantic
Coast
Conference titles and to the Final Four in 1962, which the Demon Deacons lost
to Ohio State.
He totaled 1,316 points in his career, finishing second in scoring in each of
his three
years. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics in 1962 and returned
to Wake
Forest in 1966 as an assistant coach. He held that job until 1970 while also
working in the
furniture business. In the early 1970s, while Mr. Packer was sales manager for
a radio
station in Winston-Salem, a friend asked him to fill in for the announcer of an
A.C.C. game
being televised by a syndicator. 'I wasn't nervous,' he told The Chapel Hill
News in 1974.
'I figured I'd just walk in and tell the people what I saw, and that's it. And
that's been
my approach throughout. He became a regular on syndicated broadcasts and was
hired by NBC in
1974, putting him in place to be at the center of college basketball for the
next 34 years.
He was there for John Wooden's last game as the U.C.L.A coach in 1975; the
title-game
victory of Magic Johnson's Michigan State team over Larry Bird's Indiana State
team in 1979;
North Carolina State's last-second win over Houston to win the 1983
championship; and the
successes of Duke, Indiana, Louisville, Kansas and the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. 'He
knew the game -- cold,' Kevin O'Malley, the former CBS Sports executive who
hired Mr. Packer
in 1981, wrote in an email. He added, 'Billy was the best basketball analyst at
doing one
very important thing in a fast-paced game -- 'see it and say it. He wasted no
words and
reacted to what he saw on the floor instantaneously -- a really invaluable
trait for the
broadcast. After retiring from CBS, Mr. Packer was replaced by Clark Kellogg.
In addition to
his son Brandt, a golf producer at NBC Sports and Golf Channel, Mr. Packer is
survived by
another son, Mark, the host of a daily television program on the ACC Network,
which covers
A.C.C. sports; his daughter, Liz Kimberly; four grandchildren; his sister,
Carol Dague; and
his brother, Richard. His wife, Barbara (Sucansky) Packer, died last year. Mr.
Packer said
that broadcasting was a hobby for him, compared with his interests in real
estate and golf
course development and art collecting. He also pursued other paths: He hired a
psychic to
find the knife used in the murders of O.J. Simpson's former wife, Nicole Brown
Simpson, and
her friend Ron Goldman in 1994. And he started a defense fund for Richard
Jewell, the
security guard who was wrongly suspected of planting a pipe bomb in Atlanta
that killed one
person and injured more than 100 during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Mr. Packer
had an
entrepreneurial streak that he demonstrated on the Friday before the 1995 Final
Four at the
Kingdome in Seattle. Bryant Reeves, the Oklahoma State center, shattered the
backboard on a
layup drill during the team's practice, sending pieces of it all over the
court. Mr. Packer
went after the shards, stuffing his pockets with pieces shaped like three- or
four-carat
diamonds. After an N.C.A.A. official made him surrender the pieces, he found
the person who
had swept them up, and he stuffed his pockets again. 'He didn't give up
easily,' Mr. Nantz
said, 'But when Oklahoma State got knocked out in the semifinals, I asked him
what he was
going to do with the shards. And he said: 'They're not worth anything. They
lost. It's
garbage now."
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