It crystallized for me on an Amtrak ride to New York on March 7, 1994, with a Penn team on its way to play Columbia, one more win from closing out the second of what would become three consecutive unbeaten Ivy seasons. I sat down next to senior captain Barry Pierce, as articulate off the court as he was tough on it.
Somehow, we got around to announcers. Pierce told me how much he liked Dick Vitale, because he thought him genuine. He also told me how he disliked Packer because, he thought Packer anything but genuine, using words like, well, patronizing and condescending.
I hadn't really though about it, probably because I chose to remember Packer as he was. But I thought about what Barry said. And I knew he was right.
When CBS announced yesterday that the in-touch Clark Kellogg would take over for Packer as its lead analyst for college hoops, the obvious question was: What took so long?
John Chaney used to rail about Packer, saying that he was "intellectually dishonest" and that he always "had an agenda."
Nobody around here will soon forget Packer's comments right after Saint Joseph's was awarded a No. 1 in the 2004 NCAA Tournament. If he had just said he thought other teams were more deserving, nobody really could have quarreled. It was, after all, only his opinion.
But he cited a long list of power conference teams, saying that the Hawks did not "fit in" and that they played "inferior" competition. What many St. Joe's fans did not know was that he said essentially the same thing about Indiana State and Larry Bird in 1979 as that team was going unbeaten all the way to the national championship game.
Packer's problem was that he knew nothing about Indiana State and St. Joe's. He just knew they did not play in a power conference.
