Phil Martelli remembers sparring with Billy Packer, who died Thursday
Packer is remembered best in Philadelphia for the time he dissed St. Joseph’s, saying on Selection Sunday in 2004 that the Hawks were unworthy of a top seed.
Billy Packer, who died Thursday, age 82, may have been the most famous college basketball analyst who ever lived, pre-Vitale. Maybe Packer, who was lead TV analyst at 34 straight Final Fours, stayed too long in the chair. At his height, Packer could analyze a game with precision, logic, and fearless insight. The game of the week in the 1970s, featuring Dick Enberg, Al McGuire, and Packer — as good it ever got.
Philadelphia being Philadelphia, Packer is remembered best for something else … the time he dissed St. Joseph’s, saying on Selection Sunday in 2004 that the Hawks, champions of the Atlantic 10, were unworthy of a top seed.
St. Joe’s coach Phil Martelli, now Michigan’s associate head coach, went back to his own Southwest Philadelphia roots in offering a rebuttal.
“Being perfectly blunt, Billy Packer can kiss my ass,” Martelli yelled to a packed-in, cheering Fieldhouse crowd that day. HIs Hawks were awarded a top seed after an undefeated regular season and a first-round loss to Xavier in the A-10 Tournament.
Talking Friday on the phone, Martelli can see what several decades offer, as opposed to several hours.
“That whole little chip on your shoulder,” Martelli said. “Now I understand it — that’s what they get paid to do, to present an opinion.”
Not that Martelli is backtracking …
“To make an opinion on a team he never saw.”
Packer surely shrugged and said he was right — once a shot by John Lucas went in for Oklahoma State in the last minute of the NCAA East Region final and a responding shot by Jameer Nelson didn’t fall, Packer’s choice for top seed had prevailed.
Except Nelson went on to the bigger NBA career, and Delonte West beside him did the same. Packer was right by a coin flip. And Packer was famous for downplaying mid-majors. He’d even done it to Larry Bird’s Indiana State team, which merely reached the NCAA final. John Chaney was always railing on Packer as an ACC shill.
Martelli’s reaction?
“What else would people from Philadelphia do?” Martelli said Friday of his own reaction, and then related how the next day, he got a call from the St. Joe’s dean of student life, “that my language was inappropriate. If I ever wanted to know that I worked at a small Catholic school.”
Packer had grown up in Bethlehem, the son of Lehigh’s basketball coach (from 1950-65). Packer was an all-state guard, then an all-Atlantic Coast Conference guard at Wake Forest.
Yes, the same Wake Forest that St. Joe’s beat in the 2004 Sweet 16.
If Martelli felt his own rebuttal was a bit of “Don Quixote fighting the windmill,” he knows Packer had a right to his opinion.
“For a person who has made this a livelihood, those guys — whoever you want to lump in there — have done so much for the game,” Martelli said of Packer and his fellow national analysts, such as Dick Vitale and Bill Raftery. “We have to thank them.”
Packer was ahead of his time seeing the big-time possibilities of college basketball. Was he telling it like it was? Maybe, even if there were biases he couldn’t see. Packer said he didn’t have to see every team to offer an opinion.
“I like to study the game, and research the history, and evaluate players. But I never had a favorite team or favorite player,” Packer said in 2004. “I’ve never been a sports fan.”
If Martelli and Hawks fans had a problem with that, it wasn’t his problem. If St. Joe’s didn’t make the Final Four that season, Packer did.