Billy Packer

Forgive me for this being so personal, but I’m not sure how else to tell it. We were doing the PosCast the other day — Mike Schur, Tom Haberstroh, and I opened a bunch of random packs of old basketball cards.

And as the names came up — Wayman Tisdale, Armen Gilliam, Pervis Ellison, Glenn Robinson, Xavier McDaniel, Mark Alarie, Bill Wennington — I instantly thought: Oklahoma, UNLV, Louisville, Purdue, Wichita State, Duke, St. John’s. There was a pack of college basketball cards in there and I came upon a Chris Corchiani card. Chris Corchiani! N.C. State! I can still see him, seemingly no taller than me, dribbling with those gigantic shorts that looked like long pants on him.

And I started to let my mind drift to specific teams: Jimmy Black, Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Matt Doherty, and James Worthy with Cecil Exum coming off the bench, Jim Braddock, Buzz Peterson, Warren Martin, oh, they had this big guy from Sweden or Finland or somewhere, Timo something, what was that guy’s name, oh yeah, Timo Makkonen … that’s the North Carolina national championship team.

Sidney Lowe, Derek Whittenburg, Thurl Bailey, Ernie Myers, and Cozell McQueen*, and you had Terry Gannon shooting Steph Curry-length jumpers off the bench, and of course, you had Lorenzo Charles who ended things with the dunk and Alvin Battle … that’s the N.C. State national championship team.

*I originally had Cozell McQueen saying that because he could shoot with both hands he was amphibious. But as brilliant reader Neil points out, that was actually Charles Shackleford, who played for N.C. State a bit later. McQueen was the one who said he left his hometown of Bennettsville, S.C. for N.C. State because he wanted to get out of the South.

Walter Berry, Chris Mullin, Willie Glass, Mark Jackson, and Bill Wennington were that St. John’s Final Four team, I thought they were the best team ever, oh, who else did they have on that team, Mark Moses I remember, Shelton Jones, I loved that team, went and saw them play against Davidson, got Walter Berry and Chris Mullins’ autographs, loved those guys so much.

And it occurred to me for the first time in a long time: Damn, I was a really, really big college basketball fan.

Billy Packer was as big a part of my life as family members. Well, bigger than some family members.

Yes, I know, a salute to Billy Packer, who died on Friday, probably should be more about Billy Packer himself. He was a fine player at Wake Forest — led the Demon Deacons to the Final Four one year — and he was a longtime and legendary college basketball announcer. His old partner Jim Nantz can speak better to that: “He was a genius. There was no one who would look at the field — in this case, look at the court — and see everything. … I think when you look at the pantheon of great analysts, you’ve got John Madden and you’ve got Billy Packer.”

But, I simply cannot untangle Billy Packer from my own experience. See, I was in high school when we moved from Cleveland to Charlotte, and I was extremely awkward, and this was Charlotte long before the Hornets or Panthers. I viewed myself as a big sports fan, someone who could tell you a million things about MLB or the NFL or the NBA.

But that stuff simply didn’t have any currency in Charlotte. I did not know anything about the sports that kids in Charlotte cared about then. I didn’t know anything about NASCAR. I didn’t know anything about pro wrestling. And, mostly, I didn’t know anything about college basketball.

“Who’s your team?” someone asked me on maybe my second or third day in school. When I said I liked Cleveland teams, they were like: “No, who’s your ACC team?”

And I didn’t even know what ACC meant.

What followed was a crash course on ACC basketball with Professor Packer presiding. I would watch ACC games with the intensity of Peyton Manning studying film. Billy Packer was not the only broadcaster, but he seemed to be the one who did the biggest games, he and Tim Brant mostly, though I think Packer worked with other announcers at times.

His voice became my winter heartbeat. Name an ACC team from those days, and I can instantly tell you something about them … because Billy Packer taught me.

Duke? They had a struggling young coach named Mike Krzyzewski and Vince Taylor was their star, he was a scoring machine as I recall.

Clemson? Oh, Vincent Hamilton was a big guard, could work the perimeter and back down defenders in the post. One of the Bill Fosters was their coach. It seemed like every other college basketball team in those days was coached by someone named Bill Foster.

Wake Forest? I always thought Billy gave a little extra when calling a Wake Forest game. They didn’t have one star in those days, they had several, Delaney Rudd and Anthony Teachey and Danny Young and Kenny Green — oh, Kenny Green was really fantastic, I remember he was a pretty high first-round pick by Washington. A bit later, you had Muggsy Bogues. I remember Billy saying, in his own way, Muggsy Bogues was the most intimidating player in the ACC because you simply couldn’t dribble with him anywhere nearby because he would pick your pocket clean.

Georgia Tech? Well, the first Georgia Tech teams were really quite forgettable — Brook Steppe was their star one year — but then came Mark Price, my hero, and they had John Salley and Yvon Joseph and Bruce Dalrymple and they were really good.

Maryland was loaded — everyone will remember Lenny Bias but I always liked Adrian Branch and Herman Veal and Ben Coleman, I remember Veal and Coleman being these muscular power forwards, it seemed like Lefty Driesell’s guys were just stronger than everybody else’s guys.

Virginia, obviously, was Ralph Sampson. But Othell Wilson was a fantastic player and oh, Ricky Stokes. Remember Ricky Stokes? He was not quite as small as Muggsy but the same kind of player in my memory, super-annoying, get in your face defensively, steal the ball …

Yeah, I guess I became an obsessive college basketball fan in order to blend in with everybody else.

Billy Packer was my guide, my teacher, the voice in my head.

That’s what I think about today. I’m not sure I have a lot to say about Billy Packer’s announcing style; I thought he was pretty entertaining in his younger days, though he was certainly not the ball of energy that Dick Vitale or Bill Raftery were. Toward the end of his career, though, he took a lot of criticism for becoming grumpy, preachy and a know-it-all. I vividly remember an emotional 2008 Final Four game, Kansas vs. North Carolina, this was Roy Williams against his old squad, and after the Jayhawks took a 38-12 lead, Packer plainly said: “This game is over.”

I didn’t hear him say that — I was at the game — but at halftime, I saw Jim Nantz, who told me he said that and shook his head sadly. Billy should have known better. North Carolina roared back in the game and at one point had cut the deficit to four. Kansas did pull away, but that was the last Final Four that Billy Packer broadcast.

I certainly don’t have anything to say about Billy Packer the man, I did not know him well, and he would occasionally pop up in the news in the oddest ways — like he was a pretty renowned art collector and he supposedly hired a psychic to find the knife in the O.J. Simpson murders and he once said that women shouldn’t control who gets into men’s basketball games and, well, his politics were, you know, his politics. He once said: “I’m often wrong but never in doubt.”

I can tell you he meant a lot to a younger me.

Weirdly, in the early 1990s, I ended up playing a round of Putt-Putt with him. Billy used to broadcast Putt-Putt as a personal favor to the founder of Putt-Putt, Don Clayton. So he was broadcasting a Putt-Putt tournament in Augusta, and I went to write about it, and after it was over he was like: “Come on, let’s play.” So we did. I don’t remember who won (probably him) or much of what we talked about. I just remember thinking: “Oh my gosh, I’m playing Putt-Putt with Billy Packer, the man who taught me college basketball.”