Anthony William Packer was an American college basketball player, sportscaster, and author. Packer spent more than three decades working as a color analyst for television coverage of college basketball.
Packer was born Anthony William Paczkowski in Wellsville, New York.
His parents subsequently changed their Polish surname from Paczkowski to Packer. His father Tony was an outstanding athlete in football, basketball, and baseball at St. Lawrence University and was inducted into the University’s Hall of Fame in 1982. Tony’s 35 years of service at Lehigh University included 16 seasons as the school’s men’s basketball head coach from 1950 to 1966.
Packer was a graduate of Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He attended Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina from 1958 to 1962 and played guard on the school’s basketball team for his last three years of college (at the time, freshmen were not eligible for varsity sports). He led Wake Forest to two Atlantic Coast Conference titles and the 1962 Final Four. He was a member of the Delta Nu chapter of Sigma Chi fraternity.
After graduation, he had a brief stint as an assistant coach for his alma mater. In 1972, Packer began his career in broadcasting in Raleigh, North Carolina, when he was asked to fill in as color analyst for a regionally televised ACC game. He became a regular the next season.
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.[5] 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.
