On the day CBS announced that Billy Packer’s 34-year run as lead network analyst at the NCAA Final Four was over, Packer appeared on his son Mark’s syndicated radio talk show. He seemed upbeat. He said it was a mutual agreement that had been worked out well before the 2008 Final Four in San Antonio. And, intriguingly, he intimated that his future might include some business deals with Bob Knight.

If any two people deserve each other, it’s Knight and Packer – and I say that with high regard for both. They share many of the same values, opinions, and ideals. And right before our eyes, both changed from cutting-edge leaders in their professions to dinosaurs committed to a way of life, and playing hoops, that American will never see again.

As far as anyone knows, Packer and Knight first crossed paths on the night of March 23, 1962, when Knight’s Ohio State Buckeyes defeated Packer’s Wake Forest Demon Deacons, 84-68, in the semifinals of the NCAA tournament in Louisville’s Freedom Hall.

As Wake Forest’s playmaking guard – the term “point guard” hadn’t been invented then – Packer scored 17 points, second to All-American Len Chappell’s 27. Knight came off the Ohio State bench to grab two rebounds, commit two fouls, and miss both his shots from the floor.

During his career at Wake Forest, Packer did something that would have gotten him arrested had it become public at the time in the Deep South: Without the knowledge of his coach, Horace “Bones” McKinney, he and Cleo Hill, a black player at Winston-Salem State Teachers College, began scheduling scrimmages between their teams.

“Dozens of these unauthorized scrimmages occurred in the early-to-mid ‘60s, thanks to Billy Packer, who started them as a player and continued them when he graduated and returned a few years later as a Wake Forest assistant coach,” wrote Gaines in his autobiography. “What Billy and his teammates and Cleo and his teammates did was unofficially integrate Winston-Salem.”

In 1965, when Packer returned to Wake as an assistant to McKinney,  Knight had succeeded Tates Locke at Army to become, at 24, the nation’s youngest Division I head coach. But while Knight prospered in coaching, learning at the feet of New York legends such as Clair Bee and Joe Lapchick, Packer’s career reached a dead end in 1970 when he applied for the head job at Memphis State and lost out to Gene Bartow.

At that point, Packer gave up on a coaching career and moved into radio sales. He made his broadcasting debut in 1972 as a fill-in analyst for a Maryland-N.C. State game on the ACC television network. The network owner, C.D. Chesley, was impressed enough to offer Packer a regular ACC gig that went national when Chesley merged with Eddie Einhorn’s TVS networks.

On Dec. 28, 1974, Packer worked the national telecast of the UCLA-Maryland game with two different play-by-play men – Jim Thacker, who worked for Chesley, and Dick Enberg, who was favored by Einhorn. During the 1975 NCAA tournament, Packer worked each round, including the Final Four, with the legendary Curt Gowdy.

If everything had gone according to script, Knight and Packer would have had their second Final Four meeting in 1975 – Packer as a broadcaster, Knight as coach of the top-ranked Indiana Hoosiers. But IU’s unbeaten season was ruined by Kentucky in the finals of the Mideast Region. The Wildcats then advanced to the championship game, where they lost to Coach John Wooden’s last UCLA team, 92-85.

As Packer admitted to Basketball Times editor John Akers in an interview earlier this year, he was secretly pulling for the Bruins. “Coach Wooden had resigned and I knew it was going to be his final game,” Packer told Akers. “If someone had listened to that broadcast, they wouldn’t know I was rooting, probably, but I knew I was rooting for him to win.”

When Knight’s unbeaten Hoosiers won the 1976 title in Philadelphia, Packer was working for NBC and paired with Enberg. That duo also worked the 1977 Final Four in Atlanta, where Marquette enabled Coach Al McGuire to end his career with a national championship. Soon afterward, NBC announced that McGuire would be joining Packer and Enberg on the sidelines.

For four glorious seasons, they formed what is still the best college basketball announcing team ever. Packer was the wise guy of the triumvirate – the point guard, if you will – and his concise analysis played perfectly against McGuire’s whimsical musings and Enberg’s professional reporting.

Here I must inject a personal note.

In the late 1970s or early ‘80s, Packer and McGuire asked me to ghost-write a series of syndicated newspaper columns for them that would run during the NCAA basketball tournament.

Our agreement was that they would call me after each round and, if I wasn’t home, they would leave their thoughts on my recording machine. I would then organize and edit their words and distribute the columns, through the Associated Press, to the papers that had bought the package.

McGuire’s typical message would go something like this:

“Well, I like the aircraft carrier, that big guy at Virginia, but you can never overlook Kentucky, and, yeah, maybe it’s the Digger’s turn to win. Ah, hell. You know what I think. Just go ahead and put it in my words.”

Click.

Packer, on the other hand, was a model of organization and efficiency. His comments were concise, crisp, and cogent. No ambivalence. Billy always did his homework, a concept foreign to McGuire.

On March 4, 1981, the NCAA announced that CBS had won its bidding war with NBC for the rights to the 1982, ’83, and ’84 NCAA tournaments. This meant the Enberg-Packer-McGuire team would be broken up. While both Enberg and McGuire were under long-term, exclusive contracts with NBC, Packer’s contract ended after the ’81 Final Four in Philadelphia, where Knight won his second title at Indiana.

It was hardly surprising when Packer, ever the opportunist, decided to follow the NCAA tournament to CBS. What was surprising, however, was that Knight almost left coaching to join Packer and play-by-play man Gary Bender on a new announcing triumvirate that CBS believed would have rivaled the Enberg-Packer-McGuire team.

But when IU player Landon Turner was paralyzed in an off-season car accident, Knight decided to stay in coaching, leaving Packer and Bender to work in tandem. Immediately Packer fired a shot at McGuire and NBC.

“If the fans want lollipops and daydreams, they can watch Al,” Packer told me back then. “But if they want to know what’s going on in college basketball, they’ll have to watch us.”

It took only a few years for Brent Musberger, then the 6,000-pound gorilla of CBS Sports, to muscle Bender out of the way and hook up with Packer on the network’s No. 1 college hoops team. That lasted until Musberger resigned unexpectedly after a dispute with his bosses at the 1990 Final Four in Denver. CBS replaced him with super-smooth Jim Nantz, who remained Packer’s partner through last season.

Like Knight, Packer always has remained true to himself, no matter what the consequences. Even when ESPN’s Dick Vitale surpassed him in popularity, Packer refused to change his style and become more of a showman. It simply wasn’t in his makeup to schmooze with students, engage the fans, and suck up to sports writers. Again like Knight, he spoke his mind and the hell with what anybody thought about it.

Even his employer wasn’t immune from Packer’s barbs. After CBS’ flagship news show, “60 Minutes,” did a piece on Jerry Tarkanian and his program at Fresno State, Packer exploded.

“They’ve done four college basketball stories around NCAA tournament time and they always look for the most negative thing they can find,” he said. “I think ’60 Minutes’ is a cancer in our organization and you can quote me on that. I don’t care how much money they bring in.”

It didn’t exactly help Packer’s status with his bosses when the very next night, two Fresno State players were accused of pointing a gun at a man, beating with the blunt edge of ‘samurai swords,’ and stealing his money and a camera.

“Although I’ve never met him,” said CBS icon Mike Wallace, his words dripping with sarcasm, “I’m sure Billy Packer is a fine fellow.”

Maybe that was the beginning of the end for Packer. Or maybe it was when he called Georgetown’s Allen Iverson a “tough monkey” and was accused of racism. Or maybe it was the incident in 2000 when he was accused of sexism after an exchange with a couple of Duke female guards who had asked to see his credentials as he entered Cameron Indoor. Or maybe it was when he offended the gay community during a PBS interview by saying that Charlie Rose would “fag out” on him.

Like Knight, Packer’s opinions continually embroiled him in controversy. He ticked off St. Joseph’s coach Phil Martelli in 2004 by saying his team didn’t deserve a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. He angered the entire Missouri Valley Conference when he questioned the tournament committee for give it four berths, the same as his beloved ACC.

The final straw may have been the Kansas-North Carolina game in the 2008 semifinals. When Kansas stormed to a shocking 39-point lead in the first half, Packer declared the game was “over.” That evaluation could have hardly been received warmly by the NCAA or the commercial sponsors. Even after Carolina fought back to within four in an eventual 84-66 loss, Packer refused to apologize.

“My comments probably annoyed some people,” he said, “but I don’t concern myself with having some agenda that’s contrary to what I’m seeing.”

Over the last 15 years of his career, Packer was criticized increasingly for being “too negative.” There’s no doubt that to those who want announcers to see the game through rose-colored glasses, he suffered in comparison to Vitale and others. But it’s also true that Packer is such an old-fashioned purist that he didn’t like many of the changes in how the game is coached, played, and officiated.

Neither did Knight. Neither do I. Maybe we can all be farmed out together in a hoops equivalent of Jurassic Park. It would be a place where fundamentals are emphasized, picks and screens are cherished, and colleges recruit players who are actually interested in getting an education.

I can’t wait to see what’s next for Billy, especially if it involves Bob..