College basketball announcer dies at 82

Billy Packer was a longtime college basketball announcer who covered the NCAA tournament for decades.

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Packer was a college athlete himself, playing basketball at Wake Forest University. The team made it to the Final Four in his senior year, giving him a taste of the NCAA tournament that he would later cover. His broadcast career began in the early 1970s, and he joined NBC in 1974 as a color analyst. The following year, Packer covered his first NCAA tournament, and he would continue covering them for 34 years, becoming the voice of the Final Four. Most of those years were spent at CBS after a 1981 switch. His early career coincided with a boom in the popularity of college basketball, driven by superstar young players including Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. In 1993, he won a Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Personality. Some of Packer’s quotes while broadcasting became legendary, as in 1997 when he said “Simon says… championship” as Arizona Wildcats player Miles Simon celebrated their win. The 2008 NCAA championship game between the Kansas Jayhawks and the Memphis Tigers was his final broadcast.

Tributes to Billy Packer

 

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