Jim Nantz first met Billy Packer in 1979, two months after Magic Johnson and Larry Bird played in a seminal NCAA men’s basketball championship game viewed by an estimated 40 million Americans. The NCAA golf championship that year was at Bermuda Run Golf Club in North Carolina, and the Packer family lived off the eighth green.
Advertisement
“He spoke the night before the golf tournament, and I was just completely in awe that I was in the same room as Billy,” said Nantz on Saturday afternoon from Kansas City, where he will call the AFC Championship Game on Sunday for CBS. “With my North Carolina roots, I always viewed Billy as the voice of the ACC. I would climb into my attic in Central (New) Jersey and turn the antenna around to pick up a station in Philadelphia that ran a syndicated package of ACC games. I faithfully watched Jim Thacker and Billy Packer call the ACC Game of the Week. So that night in North Carolina, I was a college sophomore at Houston, and I got to hear Billy speak. Naturally, I went up at the end of the banquet and shook his hand and told him I was a huge fan. At that point, I could have never imagined that one day I would have the gift of being Billy’s partner longer than anyone — 18 of his 34 Final Fours — and that he would become so central in my life, even one day delivering a eulogy at my father’s funeral.”
Packer died on Thursday in Charlotte at age 82. His impact on the sport of college basketball in America was immense. NBC hired Packer to work full-time with Dick Enberg in 1975. Two years later, the company added former Marquette coach Al McGuire to the mix. As Sports Illustrated once described it, “It was the best TV basketball crew ever — two un-like-minded know-it-alls separated by a straight-man referee.”
If you want to watch a sports broadcasting trio in perfect harmony, find an easy chair and view the full broadcast of that 1979 title game featuring Bird and Magic. You can’t help but become a college basketball fan — and Packer is lights-out with informing the audience on why things are happening.
Packer moved to CBS after the 1980-81 season, when CBS acquired the rights to the NCAA Tournament. At CBS, Packer was not just a broadcaster. He played a substantial part in the sale, promotion, scheduling and merchandising of college hoops. It is a hilarious sentence to write today: CBS acquired the NCAA Tournament for $48 million in 1981. The last extension of the contract (which runs through 2032) was for $8.8 billion.
Advertisement
Packer’s broadcasting resume concluded with 34 consecutive Final Fours called for NBC and CBS, with the first being John Wooden’s final game as coach in 1975 and the last being Kansas over Memphis in 2008. His legacy includes sons Mark and Brandt, both of whom went into the sports broadcasting business. (Mark is a broadcaster for ESPN’s ACC Network; Brandt is a producer for the Golf Channel and NBC.) They offered lovely tributes about their father as a family man.
“We talked on Wednesday night; he died on Thursday,” Nantz said. “And on Wednesday, I said to his son, Brandt, ‘If you get a chance, could you stick the phone in dad’s ear? Because I’d love to say hello.’ I tried to regale him with a few stories of shenanigans of yesteryear, and Brandt said later that Billy was smiling throughout. At the end, I told him I loved him.”
There was no question Packer was good at sports television. I was curious why from those who employed him.
“He had no fear of saying what his mind was telling him to say,” said CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus. “He pulled no punches. He had a really good fundamental understanding of the game of basketball and a pretty good understanding on all the relevant players at the time. When it came time to analyze a basketball game, it just flowed. It was a little bit unfiltered, which I think is for the most part good. But it was distinct. Think about certain announcers who are directly associated with the sport so that when you say that sport and you ask who the announcer was, you get a pretty consistent answer. I think on the NFL it would be John Madden. On baseball, I think it would probably be Vin Scully. On the Olympics, I think you would say Jim McKay (who is McManus’ father). For college basketball, I think Billy Packer comes to mind.”
Last year’s Final Four marked the last CBS Sports assignment for director Bob Fishman, a renowned figure in sports production who joined CBS News in 1972 and moved to CBS Sports in 1975. Among the iconic college basketball moments that Fishman directed for CBS Sports were Michael Jordan’s title-winning shot in 1982; North Carolina State’s upset of Houston the following year; Keith Smart’s winner in the 1987 title game and Kris Jenkins’ championship-winning shot for Villanova in 2016. He was Packer’s director for 27 years, including every Final Four that Packer called at CBS.
Advertisement
“He was not interested in the mechanics of how the television events got done or how they were produced or directed,” Fishman said. “He was just into the game, the two teams on the floor, educating the audience. We had to learn his pace, and he had to learn our pace. He understood how I was a pretty aggressive camera-cutter, showing the emotion of the game. I told him early on, ‘It’s not always about the X’s and O’s, which you are so good at. There’s other things.’ I tried to be a director who captured the emotion of every game, and those are the times you want to lay out and let the pictures do the talking. He fully understood that and appreciated it. We had a great run together.”
Fishman told a story on Friday night about how Packer’s relationship with coaches really helped the CBS broadcast, especially his relationship with then-Indiana coach Bobby Knight.
“Billy and Bobby had a great relationship, but Billy didn’t take any crap from Bobby Knight,” Fishman said. “A lot of the guys on our crew and other TV crews were kind of intimidated by Knight because he had no use for the media. But Billy wouldn’t take any crap. Billy set up lunches for Knight to join our crew, and Bobby is making some excuse that he doesn’t want to go and talk to these guys. Billy would just go after him and say things to Knight no other human being would possibly have the guts to do. Knight might be sitting there with us not saying anything and Billy would say, ‘Bob, we didn’t invite you here not to talk. Stop this crap. Get your head out of your ass and talk to us.’ That’s how he would talk to Knight, and it was great.”
Packer was not without controversy — a lot of it. In the 1980s, he crusaded against teams that had foreign athletes, believing it unfair for those born abroad to take scholarships from U.S. athletes. That xenophobic take in a global marketplace looks absurd in hindsight. During a Georgetown-Villanova game in 1996, he used the term “tough monkey″ to describe then-Georgetown star Allen Iverson. Washington’s CBS affiliate and Georgetown received numerous complaints, and Packer said on the air he meant no offense.
“I only apologized to those people who have those sensibilities,” Packer told the Washington Post at the time. “But I also feel sorry for people like that because I don’t see things in terms of black and white.”
Packer met with Iverson and then-Georgetown coach John Thompson, and Thompson said neither he nor Iverson was offended. “One thing I do know about Billy … is that he is not a racist,” Thompson told the Post.
In 2000, Packer apologized to two Duke students for sexist remarks he made to them as they checked press passes at the Cameron Indoor Stadium entrance. The remarks, as recalled then by one of the students: “’You need to get a life. Since when do we let women control who gets into a men’s basketball game? Why don’t you go find a women’s game to let people into?'”
Advertisement
His criticism of the tournament committee became a running segment on Selection Sunday and often pitted him against someone, including annoyed fans and coaches. Famously, in 2004, after Packer knocked Saint Joseph’s credentials as a No. 1 seed on CBS, Saint Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli told gatherers at a school Selection Sunday party: “Billy Packer can kiss my ass.”
He was very different than ESPN’s Dick Vitale, a contemporary who hyped college basketball while Packer was a far more sobering voice. Packer’s personal motto, as mentioned in many pieces, was “Often wrong but never in doubt.” My colleague Seth Davis, who worked with Packer at CBS, has a worthwhile tribute piece here.
The run at CBS ended for Packer in 2008 after 27 years as the network’s lead college basketball analyst. He was replaced by Clark Kellogg. McManus said Packer was respectful as an employee, even when he disagreed with his boss.
“He was not afraid to express his opinion if it differed from mine,” McManus said. “But in the end, he understood that he was an employee and he had a boss. I remember when I told him that we were going to move on (with a new Final Four and national championship game analyst), he was incredibly gracious. We talked about him doing a couple more years of games and he said, ‘I think it’s probably time for a younger generation to come in.’ He wasn’t bitter in any way. He had great appreciation for the opportunities that he had at CBS, and he remained a friend long after he was no longer working at CBS.”
Fishman said Packer had removed himself from college basketball over his final years and preferred the NBA and other sports.
“He could be a curmudgeon and an angry guy, but I think he basically said, ‘This is not the sport I loved and I grew up with,'” Fishman said. “He said, ‘I’d rather watch accomplished great players in the NBA or I’d rather watch other sports.'”
The college basketball announcer as a broadcast god is a relic of the past. Vitale is 83 and on a limited schedule. (He tweeted out condolences.) The sport’s greatest talents only stay a year at schools now — and even that has changed with international stars going directly into the NBA and the advent of the G-League. No college basketball game, including last year’s national championship between Kansas and North Carolina or the semifinals between Duke and North Carolina, was on the list of the 50 most-watched sports broadcasts of 2022.
Advertisement
Packer was a man of his time, an award-winning broadcaster who had an oversized impact on his sport. For college basketball, that kind of impact is unlikely to be duplicated anytime soon if ever again. We live in a different world now. But how college basketball got here, and how that sport grew, owes a lot to Billy Packer.
“I told you how giddy I was when we first met in 1979,” Nantz said. “Fast forward to his last Final Four in 2008. Kansas jumped out to a huge first-half lead on North Carolina in the semifinal. Billy always worked off a manila folder — and with 7:38 on the clock before halftime, he folded it together and said, ‘Jim, this game is over.’ I said, ‘It is?’ And he said, ‘It is.’ He got a lot of pushback for the early call but guess what? He was right.
“So now we fast forward to (the championship game). Kansas-Memphis. Mario Chalmers, just as time is expiring in regulation, hits this rainbow 3 from the top of the key to send the game to overtime. And when the shot dropped, the only thing I thought was, ‘My gosh, how lucky am I? I get five more minutes with Billy.’ I would give anything for five more.”
(Photo of Billy Packer and Jim Nantz, in 1999: Bob Stowell / Getty Images)
ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57k2pqamtganxzfJFsZmlpX2eFcK7IpaOyZaCWsKyx0WabnpmknXqrtcxmpZqmpK98