Longtime college basketball commentator Billy Packer, the voice of the NCAA tournament for more than 30 years, died Thursday night. He was 82.
Packer was the lead college basketball analyst for 34 straight Final Fours, first at NBC and then at CBS, while also doing work as an analyst for ACC games on Raycom. He received a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Sports Personality, Studio and Sports Analyst in 1993.
Packer was the son of longtime basketball coach Anthony Packer, who spent 16 seasons as the head coach at Lehigh. After earning all-state honors as a high schooler in Pennsylvania, Packer attended Wake Forest, where he was named All-ACC in 1961 and 1962. He helped lead the Demon Deacons to three ACC regular-season titles and their first Final Four appearance in 1962, when Packer was named to the all-region team.
He briefly entered the coaching profession before getting his start as an announcer in 1972. Packer told The Athletic in 2019 he “never had any goal to be a broadcaster.”
But within two years, Packer was on the call for NCAA tournament and Final Four games and didn’t give up his seat until leaving in 2008.
“I made up my mind halfway through my career that someday I won’t be doing this anymore. One of the things I said to myself was that I really enjoy the research and studying the game and having the opportunity to interface with people I respect that really know the game and its history. And if I didn’t enjoy doing that, I’d want to stop,” he told The Athletic. “There’s a point where you say, OK, I’ve enjoyed my run, and now it’s time to go back and do the other things I enjoy. The last game I’ve seen in person was the last game I broadcast. That was the [2008] national championship game between Memphis and Kansas.”
Packer has some of the most famous calls in Final Four history, perhaps most notably saying, “Simon says … championship” after Miles Simon led Arizona to the 1997 national championship.
He was also part of the broadcast in 1979 with Dick Enberg and Al McGuire when Magic Johnson’s Michigan State team defeated Larry Bird’s Indiana State squad in the title game. That remains the highest-rated game in basketball history with a 21.1 Nielsen rating, which is an estimated 35.1 million viewers.