Longtime faculty basketball broadcaster Billy Packer dies at 82
Longtime faculty basketball analyst and iconic Last 4 broadcaster Billy Packer died on Thursday, his sons introduced on Twitter.
He was 82.
Packer’s son, Mark, told The Associated Press that his father died resulting from kidney failure after coping with numerous well being points for a number of weeks in North Carolina.
Packer spent greater than three many years calling faculty basketball, and labored on 34 Last 4 broadcast groups all through his profession at each NBC and CBS. He labored as CBS analyst from 1981-2008 and rapidly turned one of many largest voices within the sport every March, calling video games alongside different greats like Jim Nantz, Brent Musburger, Dick Enbert, Curt Gowdy and others. His first Last 4 got here in 1975, when UCLA and coach John Picket received the title. His final was Kansas’ win over Memphis in 2008.
He stepped away from the sport after that season. Packer labored briefly stints within the sports activities world and elsewhere, however largely stayed personal from there on out — one thing he told The Athletic in 2019 was by design. He stated then that the ultimate recreation he known as was the final faculty basketball recreation he watched in particular person, and that he realized he by no means was actually a sports activities fan.
Packer performed collegiately himself for Wake Forest, and picked up a pair of All-ACC honors and helped lead the Demon Deacons to a Last 4 in 1962 with coach Horace “Bones” McKinney.
Jim’s two sons, Mark and Brandt, each work in sports activities broadcasting. Mark is an analyst and host with the ACC Community, and Brandt is a producer with the Golf Channel.
“He actually loved doing the Last Fours,” Mark stated, via The Associated Press. “He timed it proper. Every little thing in life is about timing. The power to become involved in one thing that, frankly, he was going to observe anyway, was a pleasure to him. After which faculty basketball simply form of took off with Magic Johnson and Larry Fowl and that turned, I believe, the catalyst for school basketball followers to simply go loopy with March Insanity.”