Here is the YouTube clip I referenced in my Tuesday newspaper column about Billy Packer.
Note the clunky black phones sitting in front of Packer and Curt Gowdy as they discuss the UCLA victory toward the end of the clip. Remember clunky black phones? Sigh.
Click below for a bunch of stuff from Packer that I could not fit in the afore-linked column.
Packer on 1992 being a transition point in basketball's evolution:
"You had the Dream Team, players who developed their game, went to college, played the college game, developed their game there, had instinctive competitive instincts. At the same time you had the college game in 1992, where Duke repeats as the national champion and it’s a senior-oriented team. You have the Christian Laettners, you have the Bobby Hurleys, you have the Grant Hills, all guys who played four years of college. They understood this is a team game and a team competition.
"And who did they play? Michigan, the Fab Five. The Fab Five in effect represented the future direction of the game, the fashion, it’s about me, it’s about taking money under the table with no regard to the rules and regulations. It was about exhibitionism. It was about promotion before production.
"A guy called me from Michigan a couple of weeks ago wanting to do an article on the Fab Five. I said, 'How can you be a Fab Five when you never won a conference championship?' The Fab Five is the University of Kentucky that won two straight national championships and an Olympic gold medal. It's not a Fab Five because you make it one.
"To me that’s the demarcation point. Because in a very short period of time, we went from being the supreme reflection of American basketball to a problem in Toronto [at the world championships] where we have a whole different mindset of guys and a whole different mindset of how to play.
"From that point on the player thinks it’s about exhibiting his basketball skill, it’s not about the game anymore. We don’t have bad people, we have guys who are totally misdirected.
"Chuck Daly had to stop a scrimmage that nobody is watching because Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson have decided to pick teams and are trying to kick each other’s ass. It’s not the same game. It’s an exhibition of physical skills."
Packer on the effect of underclassmen going to the NBA:
"The reason Kevin Love is a great college center right now is because he’s not playing against the junior and senior centers who are playing in the NBA.. You think we’d be talking about Kevin Love if he’s facing Dwight Howard?"
Packer on Clarence (Big House) Gaines being the only person other than a media critic to give him unsolicited advice about his broadcasting, after the first game he ever broadcast, in 1971:
"I go down and do the post-game interview. Lefty Driesell won [with Maryland] at N.C. State. He had a reputation of great recruiter but not a bench coach, but he’d done a hell of a job in this game.
"So I say, 'Lefty, we all know you’re not much of a coach but you’re a hell of a recruiter.' Lefty answers me, but I get home the next morning, and this is the only critique I’ve ever had from somebody other than people I’ve asked: The phone rings, and it's, 'Son, your dad was a coach. You tried to be one. You know more about what a coach has to go through to be successful. Don’t you ever make that kind of comment on television again.’ Click.
"The tone was, 'I have spoken.' I was [thinking], 'Yes, House, I understand.' To this day it’s part of my thinking. You have to respect what a guy is trying to do."
Packer on CBS's approach to covering games:
"One of the things that CBS has embraced through Tony [Petitti] and Sean [McManus] is that it really is about the game and it is not about us or our personalties or trying to be different. We try to show the game in a clean and concise way and help the sport be what it is as opposed to trying to make it something it’s not.
"I think there has been honesty. When we do the game there is not any ego trip that we’re on the game, where we’re assigned or whether we get on camera. We want to show the basketball games. You work with great guys and have a good time as long as you have the right perspective that it’s about the game, not about you, it’s not that difficult."
Packer on the decline of college basketball in the New York area:
"You don’t want to see any area of the country that in effect is going down. As an example, Texas used to be a barren area for college basketball. Now the state of Texas produces more Division I players than any state in the United States. So all of a sudden you go down to College Station, Texas, and go into an arena and 25 years ago there were maybe 2,500 people, now all of a sudden there’s 20,000 people and they’re going crazy. So the game has changed a lot."