Anthony William Packer (born Anthony William Paczkowski; February 25, 1940 – January 26, 2023) was an American sportscaster and a published author. Packer spent more than three decades working as a color analyst for television coverage of college basketball.
Packer first worked at the network level with NBC (1974–1981) and then CBS (1981–2008). He covered every NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship, including the Final Four from 1975 to 2008. For many years he also covered ACC games for Raycom Sports. In 1986 he helped create the computer game Hoops. He won a Sports Emmy Award in 1993.
In 2005, Packer received the Marvin Francis Award for "notable achievement and service in coverage of the ACC," as reported by The Washington Post. On July 15, 2008, CBS announced that Packer would be replaced by Clark Kellogg on the network's lead broadcast crew. This marked the end of 35 straight years of Packer covering the NCAA tournament as a TV analyst.
In March 2009, he returned to the studio with Bob Knight for Survive and Advance, an NCAA tournament preview show produced by Fox Sports Net. Packer also served as a color commentator for Putt-Putt Professional Putters Association television broadcasts. He called the historic 1982 PPA National Championship, which featured 4 future Hall of Fame players among the 8 contestants.
Packer was the author of Hoops, Why We Win, and a number of other basketball books. He was married to Barbara, and they had three children. Two of his children (Brandt and Mark) work in sports media, Brandt works as a producer for Golf Channel and Mark is a sports radio host based in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1988, Billy Packer was inducted into the National Polish American Sports Hall of Fame. Packer died of kidney failure on January 26, 2023, at the age of 82.
