College basketball has a different energy from the other sports on television. It doesn&#8217;t stop and start like football or move leisurely through the evening like baseball or gradually build up to the big moments like soccer. It isn&#8217;t violent chaos coming at you in shifts like hockey. It isn&#8217;t tactical like golf or savage like boxing or a geometry lesson like tennis. College basketball is not even like professional basketball, which is, you know, professional, with all of the skill and detachment that comes with that word.</p><p>No, college basketball is its own thing &#8212; innocent but not really, exciting and sloppy, loud and fun and erratic and forever young. And it is, for all those reasons and others, the only game that could have fit those gigantic personalities of Billy Packer and Dick Vitale. Could you imagine Packer sounding off on an NFL game? Could you imagine Dick Vitale screaming, &#8220;Awesome, baby!&#8221; at one of his beloved baseball games? No. College basketball fits them. And they fit college basketball.</p><p>They were born eight months apart, and they took very different roads, but tonight, Packer and Vitale will be inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame at the Sprint Center. They go in together, which is only right, because even though they aren&#8217;t friends, even though they have never worked together or gone to dinner together, even though their styles are as different as red and blue, they are the twin voices of college basketball.</p><p>&#8220;Can you name any analyst, in any sport, who you identify with their sport the way you identify college basketball with Billy Packer and Dick Vitale?&#8221; CBS&#8217; Jim Nantz asks. &#8220;I guess you could say John Madden with the NFL. But after that? Can you name anyone else? I don&#8217;t think you can.&#8221;</p><p>&#8226; &#8226; &#8226;</p><p>Here are six things about Billy Packer you probably did not know:</p><p>1. He is a serious collector of Picasso ceramics.</p><p>2. He purchased the rights to Notre Dame football and broadcast games in Europe.</p><p>3. He purchased the rights to Putt-Putt on television and broadcast those tournaments himself. He also tried to bring slow-pitch softball to television.</p><p>4. He co-founded the Tour of China, probably the biggest bicycle race in China.</p><p>5. He&#8217;s a multimillionaire &#8212; mostly from his real estate and development work &#8212; but he refuses to fly first class (&#8220;He prefers the back of the plane and a middle seat,&#8221; Nantz says), and when he comes to New York, he will take the bus and subway into town rather than splurge on a cab or have CBS send out a car.</p><p>6. He does not own a cell phone and has no idea how to use a computer, but he is about to announce a new business venture that will involve both.</p><p>There are no doubt countless other things about Packer you did not know &#8212; he&#8217;s active politically, he led Wake Forest to the 1962 Final Four, he has never had an assistant or an office, he is obsessed by courtrooms and once had in mind a TV movie surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial &#8212; and there is a reason you did not know. He doesn&#8217;t talk about them.</p><p>Billy Packer was the color commentator for every single Final Four from 1975 (that would be the last game John Wooden ever coached) to 2008 (when Mario Chalmers hit the shot). He broadcast 34 Final Fours, which isn&#8217;t just a record in college basketball, it&#8217;s probably a record for an analyst in any sport. Tim McCarver has broadcast 19 World Series, a baseball record, but that&#8217;s not even close to Packer. Pat Summerall did 16 Super Bowls, but only the first few as a color commentator. Madden has done 10 Super Bowls as a color commentator.