THERE was a lot going on around here last week, thus when Billy Packer, after 28 years, left CBS on what seemed to be on business-like, room-temperature mutual terms, a big off-season story was forced off the road.
It’s a sad story, too, and not just because CBS this season won’t conduct a Billy Packer Farewell Tour.
Packer could have been the most important, course-changing person in college sports. He had the knowledge, the guts, the national forum and, for a few years, the inclination. He was different. He seemed willing, if not eager, to poke and prod and embarrass, to at least try to diminish the social, academic and economic corruption that still runs the NCAA show.
Packer, in single-game telecasts, had an extraordinary transition game, from a strong Xs-and-Os analyst to a get-you-thinking journalist. To that end, he made for great expectations, perhaps too great and too unrealistic given that live sports TV doesn’t normally provide muckraking beyond whether the ref blew the call.
Like many national TV people when they’ve won maximum exposure, credibility and clout, Packer backed off. Then he surrendered. Then he began to work for the other side.
For those who felt many years ago that Packer was the one guy on TV who could and would force college basketball to a cleaner table, well, he broke our hearts.
In 1981, when Packer and the NCAA tournament left NBC for CBS, Packer, no longer part of a three-man team (with Dick Enberg and Al McGuire), began to be heard. He began to say things, often slightly impolitic things, but things that made sense, things based on an insider’s wisdom, things that got thoughtless people thinking. He addressed issues beyond man-to-man vs. zone.
By 1990, Packer knew that the sneaker companies were thoroughly co-opting big-time college basketball, from the school presidents, to the ADs, to the head coaches. And he wasn’t afraid to say so, or at least drop parenthetical hints while on the air.
By 1990, Packer would look at teams’ made-for-TV schedules and travel itineraries then ask how attending classes was possible.
In 1992, Packer had the guts to tell audiences that basketball scholarships that American colleges, especially taxpayer-funded state schools, once granted 18-year-old, American high school seniors, were increasingly being awarded to 21-year-olds from all over the world, players who, at great expense, were being recruited to American universities regardless of whether they could even speak English.
Strong stuff. Important stuff. The stuff no one else working college basketball telecasts had the nerve or confidence to even whisper.
But then, all of a sudden, or so it seemed, Packer stopped. Suddenly, the typical, secondary stuff such as NCAA tournament seeding, who’s on “the bubble,” and how many ACC teams should get in, became Packer’s primary issues.
Maybe I read too much into it, but in 1993 a press kit arrived, one that heralded Packer, the Dutch brewery Heineken, and Nike as the makers of a new, annual tournament that would take teams of college All-Stars across the Atlantic to play European club teams.
The tournament allowed “Nike coaches” to scout foreign players for their big-time Nike college programs, the US college teams were called “The Nike All-Stars,” the tournament made for an added and extended road trip for “student-athletes” – everything that had given Packer the creeps about where Div. I basketball was headed.
And Packer’s photo and endorsement quotes were here, there and everywhere. It had his full stamp of commercial approval.
I’m not sure whether that enterprise marked the end of Packer as an on-air crusader, but, as far as I knew, he never again, at least on CBS’s air, went after the follow-the-money underbelly issues.
He could still talk tough, off the record, on the phone, but his days of raising noble hell on CBS seemed over.
And then, while calling the last couple of his 34 consecutive Final Fours on national TV, he seemed to become haughty, inflexibly attached to his this-is-what-to-expect analysis, so much so that he tried to make the game fit his analysis rather than the reverse. Pity.
In 1994, an interview of Packer appeared in The Charlotte Observer. He was asked whether he considers himself a journalist.
“Journalist is a bull[bleep] word because we’re all in it for a bottom line. If I could give [you] the opportunity to work for ‘Inside Edition’ for $300,000 a year, you’d say, ‘What the hell kind of story they want?’ So we all got a price.”
Hmmm.
But for nearly 10 years, from about 1984 into 1993, Packer, on CBS, sure sounded like an incorruptible journalist. For a while, he was the guy; he was among the wisest and most courageous any-issues, all-issues in-game analysts on national TV.
Maybe he just stood out because so few even gave it a shot. There were louder analysts, funnier analysts, more popular analysts. But for a while, there was none more important than Billy Packer.