In 2000, he snapped at two female students who were checking press passes at the Duke Cameron Indoor Stadium, saying, according to news reports, “Since when do we let women control who enters a men’s Basketball game?” He later apologized.

Anthony William Paczkowski was born on February 25, 1940 in Wellsville, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, and moved to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where his father, also named Anthony, was hired to coach the Lehigh University men’s basketball team. Shortly thereafter, the elder Mr. Packer changed his surname. Billy’s mother, Lois (Cruikshank) Packer, was a housewife.

Billy played quarterback at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and led the team to two Atlantic Coast titles and to the Final Four in 1962, in which the Demon Deacons lost to Ohio State. During his career, he scored 1,316 points, finishing second in each of his three years.

He received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1962 and returned to Wake Forest in 1966 as an assistant coach. He held this position until 1970 while also working in the furniture business. In the early 1970s, when Mr. Packer was sales manager for a radio station in Winston-Salem, a friend asked him to fill in as the announcer for an ACC game being televised by a syndicator.

“I wasn’t nervous,” he told The Chapel Hill News in 1974. “I decided that I would just go in and tell people what I saw, that’s all. And that was my approach to everything.”

He became a syndicated regular and was hired by NBC in 1974, placing him at the center of college basketball for the next 34 years. He was there for John Wooden’s last game as UCLA coach in 1975; Michigan Magic Johnson’s title game victory over Larry Bird’s Indiana State in 1979; NC State’s last-second victory over Houston to win the 1983 championship; and the successes of Duke, Indiana, Louisville, Kansas, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“He knew the game—coldly,” Kevin O’Malley, the former CBS Sports executive who hired Mr. Packer in 1981, wrote in an email. He added: “Billy was the best basketball analyst and could do one very important thing in a dynamic game -” see and say “. He didn’t waste words and reacted instantly to what he saw on the floor – a truly invaluable trait for a broadcast.”

Content Source