One of the top college basketball analysts of all time has died. Billy Packer was 82.
The broadcaster for CBS, got his start at the network in the early 1980s. He was known as “the voice of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament,” spent 35 broadcasting NCAA games.
His son, Mark, announced his death on Twitter Thursday.
Mark also told the Associated Press that his father died of kidney failure after being hospitalized in Charlotte for three weeks with several medical issues.
Packer was born Anthony William Paczkowski. He later changed his name to Packer.
FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
EARLY LIFE
Packer was born Anthony William Paczkowski in Wellsville, New York. His parents subsequently changed their Polish surname from Paczkowski to Packer. His father Tony was an outstanding athlete in football, basketball, and baseball at St. Lawrence University and was inducted into the University’s Hall of Fame in 1982. Tony’s 35 years of service at Lehigh University included 16 seasons as the school’s men’s basketball head coach from 1950 to 1966.
Packer was a graduate of Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He attended Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina from 1958 to 1962 and played guard on the school’s basketball team for his last three years of college (at the time, freshmen were not eligible for varsity sports). He led Wake Forest to two Atlantic Coast Conference titles and the 1962 Final Four. He was a member of the Delta Nu chapter of Sigma Chi fraternity.
After graduation, he had a brief stint as an assistant coach for his alma mater. In 1972, Packer began his career in broadcasting in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he was asked to fill in as color analyst for a regionally televised ACC game. He became a regular the next season.
BROADCASTING CAREER
Packer first worked at the network level with NBC (1974–1981) and then CBS (1981–2008). He covered every NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship, including the Final Four from 1975 to 2008. For many years he also covered ACC games for Raycom Sports. In 1986 he helped create the computer game Hoops. He won a Sports Emmy Award in 1993.
In 2005, Packer received the Marvin Francis Award for “notable achievement and service in coverage of the ACC,” as reported by The Washington Post.
On July 15, 2008, CBS announced that Packer would be replaced by Clark Kellogg on the network’s lead broadcast crew. This marked the end of 35 straight years of Packer covering the NCAA tournament as a TV analyst.
In March 2009, he returned to the studio with Bob Knight for Survive and Advance, an NCAA tournament preview show produced by Fox Sports Net. Packer also served as a color commentator for Putt-Putt Professional Putters Association television broadcasts. He called the historic 1982 PPA National Championship, which featured 4 future Hall of Fame players among the 8 contestants.
ANNOUNCING STYLE
Packer was described as a broadcaster as “overbearing, arrogant, condescending, dismissive and petulant”. Sports-radio talk-show host Mike Francesa would say Packer would broadcast games with a red marker. A red marker is often used by teachers to correct errors by students. Packer was criticized for always telling fans what went wrong instead of complimenting players and strong play. If a team scored, it was always the fault of poor defense. If a team didn’t score, he would often criticize a player for failing to execute a play property or taking an ill-advised shot. Players and games were always expected to be better. He was also noted for constantly criticizing coaching strategies. This was a stark contrast to the enthusiasm of other noted college basketball broadcasters like Dick Vitale and Bill Raftery. Francesa said Packer’s constant negativity could be off-putting to the audience watching at home. Others in the media, also started to feel that Packer had become too much of a curmudgeon and constantly harped on everything wrong in college basketball and society at large.
