He forgets players' numbers.

He'd rather not rely heavily on instant replay.

He's a walking conflict of interest.

And that's only what Billy Packer says about himself.

As he prepares to work his 34th consecutive NCAA Final Four in college basketball -- a championship record in any sport that CBS partner Jim Nantz predicts will last forever -- Packer doesn't even consider himself a professional broadcaster. His role as the college game's senior spokesman qualifies as merely a "neat segment" in a richly compartmentalized life.

His television career "is not what he does," says his younger brother, Dick.

At 68, Billy Packer is still looking for the next good deal. He's made millions of dollars outside television, much of it in real estate, more than enough to walk away from the microphone whenever he chooses. He's a political junkie who'd just as soon talk about a campaign as he would a season. He collects art, with a particular fondness for Picasso ceramic plates.

Still, he loves to prepare for a game, the studying it takes, as if again measuring himself against other players and coaches, against the game itself. In pregame mode, he shuts out all else. He compartmentalizes.

"Like, if you like a subject in school, to prepare for the test is not a job, it's fun to learn and understand it," Packer says in an interview at his home in Charlotte. "And then when the test comes, it's fun to compete with the other kids in the class, and then when the test comes back, it's fun to get an A.

"To me, that's what broadcasting is."

As soon as the game ends, it's gone, out of his head. He couldn't tell you the starting lineups in a game he worked three days ago.

"I tune that out and don't tune it back in until I'm ready to be in that part of my life again," he says. "I don't sit around daydreaming about basketball all day long."

That helps explain why, after so many years, he hasn't lost his passion for the sport. In whatever daydreams he does allow himself, he hasn't heard a final buzzer yet.

"I know I would definitely not do another game if ... two things were involved," Packer says. " No. 1, I wasn't properly prepared, or at least somebody could prepare better, and No. 2, when I got there I didn't want to be there.

"I don't know how you could fake that. And I'm not talking about the fans. It'd be easy to fake it to the fans and to the listeners. But to yourself ..."

After all, Billy Packer really answers to himself.

The Packer haters

At a point when other broadcasting icons could expect to soak up the adulation of lifelong listeners, Packer takes more hits than a dartboard in a crowded bar. He is described variously as a cranky, inflexible, arrogant old man who's out of touch with the modern game, humorless and unwilling to admit he's wrong.

Google Packer's name, and the Internet search engine spits back a stream of venom.

"CBS -- Please remove Billy Packer from the airwaves," a petition posted by a fellow Wake Forest alumnus, pops up just above CBS' official bio.

Scroll down a couple of spots, and you get to the Awful Announcing Web site's article, "Billy Packer Could Take The Joy Out of Sex," from where it's easy to spot ACC BasketBlog's "Billy Packer Hatred" page.

Packer's Q Score of 13 -- his "likeability" rating -- put him 33rd of 37 sports announcers last year, according to Marketing Evaluations Inc., which annually surveys fans to measure sports figures' familiarity and appeal.

Forrest Maready, the Wake Forest graduate who posted the Packer petition about four years ago, says about 5,300 Web users have "signed" it. A 36-year-old advertising designer in Durham, Maready gives the impression that he's a thoughtful college basketball fan, not prone to obscenity-laced rants, more frustrated than angry.

"It's funny," Maready says. "Tar Heel fans will claim that he's exclusively a Duke fan ... and then Duke fans will swear that he hates them. You know, everyone thinks that he hates them. And I think he just hates everyone, basically."

Funny, but in separate interviews, Packer and Nantz offer similar descriptions to explain fans' resentment. "Everybody thinks he's everybody else's guy, which means he's doing it right," Nantz says.

"What I've always loved is the competition of being able to go out there and say what I see and to be objective, but that in turn obviously annoys people, because 50 percent of them, that objectivity is not gonna be what they want to hear," Packer says.

Fans carry no weight

The barbs from fans and media critics might concern Packer if they mattered much to him.

Uh, no.

He doesn't dismiss fans entirely. He says he understands that he's working for them, too. The very passion that prompts some local fans to jeer him keeps him hungry to continue analyzing ACC games on Raycom, the regional network.

When it's time to judge what he's said on the air, however, this ultimate insider -- a coach's son who played and coached himself -- turns primarily to three sources: fellow broadcasters and TV producers, coaches past and present and, of course, himself.

"I would never not give a fan the right to have an opinion or even to want to talk about it, but I would give no weight to some guy that's runnin' his mouth about what I do," he says. "That's a waste of my time. I don't spend any time with that nor ever worry about it."

Coaches like Syracuse's Jim Boeheim appreciate Packer's basketball background and ability to analyze a game "without trying to barbecue coaches and players." Far from grilling coaches, Packer has been accused of identifying too closely with them on the air -- a criticism he refutes while then making the case that, as athletes come and go in today's college game, "the coach is the most important player in the game."

Off the air, he's done charity work with Boeheim and, though he doesn't like to go into detail about his deals off the court, acknowledges he has had financial relationships with other coaches. For example, he hired Memphis' John Calipari to coach a team of college seniors on a European tour Packer arranged.

He has also put together projects sponsored by Nike but insists he's never been paid by that or any other shoe company.

Again, those are different compartments. Packer The Dealmaker and Packer The TV Analyst are kept strictly separate, so in his mind, he's got nothing to hide.

"I'm a walking conflict of interest," Packer says. "... Now if somebody could show me where that conflict turned out to have a negative impact on the game, then I would be first of all embarrassed by it and certainly make sure it didn't happen again."

He keeps his own scorecard based on avoiding factual errors, remaining objective and, most important, staying ahead of the game, spotting developments even before the coaches do. He so detests being slow on a call that he tries to "referee the game in my own mind as if I had a whistle, and so I don't need to see the replay," he says. "I'm gonna say what I see."

That approach has opened him to second-guessing, particularly following two claims he made last year: that Duke's Gerald Henderson didn't intentionally bloody the face of North Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough in a regular-season game, and that Georgetown's Jeff Green didn't walk with the ball just before hitting the winning shot in an NCAA game against Vanderbilt. Even CBS' studio analysts, Clark Kellogg and Seth Davis, said replays showed Green had traveled.

A year later, Packer verbally recreates each play in detail and, in the end, firmly sticks with his original calls.

It's the certainty that bugs some people. The traffic on his petition site really picked up after the Henderson-Hansbrough incident, Maready says. In his Page 2 column on ESPN.com, Bill Simmons wrote: "In Packer's world, he's always right, and everyone else is always wrong. Unless they agree with him."

Those who know him would argue that such critics are confusing certainty with self-righteousness.

"Billy once said to me, 'I'm often wrong, but I'm never in doubt,' " Dick Packer says.

Unafraid to critique her husband's commentary, Barbara Packer says she has told him when he appears to be angry on camera or "a bit too serious."

How does he take it?

"He kind of laughs," she says. "You have to understand Billy. ... It takes an awful lot to anger him. He is very easygoing. He's very loose. He's actually the antithesis of what appears on the TV screen."

That outsiders don't "get" him doesn't keep Packer up at night. (Actually, he sleeps great, he says.)

"Very few people know anything about me, period, other than their own perceptions," he says, "which I kind of like that, too."

Origins of an analyst

He is, first of all, the son of a coach.

Little secret: The Princeton offense for which Pete Carril became known? Tony Packer was running a version of it as Lehigh's head coach in the 1950s and '60s, although his exacting son acknowledges "there'd be no historical way to say that." Carril succeeded Tony Packer for a year before moving to Princeton.

A few years ago, after Sports Illustrated published an article describing Carril as essentially the guru of the motion offense, Dick Packer says he ran into Carril and asked him good-naturedly: "If you're the genius, what does that make my father?"

Putting a finger to his lips, Packer recalls, Carril replied: "Sssssshhhhh."

Tony Packer also coached baseball at Lehigh and, as an assistant, helped the football team go unbeaten in 1950.

Billy was born Anthony Paczkowski 10 years earlier in Wellsville, N.Y. -- he says his father changed the family's Polish name so he wouldn't risk losing job opportunities, and "William" was added at the same time.

When he was 5, Billy was already a gym rat, and at Lehigh, he'd go straight from school to his dad's practices. When they were alone together, their conversations began to mold in the young Packer a way of seeing the game that influences his commentary to this day. They would diagram offenses and defenses in the living room and talk more about thinking through the game than about specific skills.

"When my brother comes on the screen," Dick Packer says, "I see my father."

Assistant on the floor

By the time Billy got to Wake Forest, after a recruiting brush with Duke, he wasn't shy about basketball or business, making money on the side and making himself an extra assistant coach.

"Something went wrong and he didn't like it, he would tell us, and he didn't mind going back at the coach even," says Al Koehler, a former teammate and now director of investigations for the N.C. Department of Insurance.

Packer, who developed an unusual bond with legendary Horace "Bones" McKinney, felt comfortable enough to occasionally challenge the man he considered a mentor. McKinney possessed enough self-assurance to listen.

A Baptist preacher who was considered one of the sharpest coaches in the country, the late McKinney would get so excited on the bench that he once tried a seat belt. (Didn't work.) He might yell out three or four different plays at once, Koehler says, so Packer, an All-ACC guard, would avoid his coach by bringing the ball upcourt "on the opposite side from Bones."

"You know what Bones said about Billy -- that Billy always thought he was assistant coach," says Bill Hull, another former teammate. "He always tried to tell people what to do. Bones said [Packer] did it because he was from Bethlehem, Pa., and thought he was Jesus Christ. Bones was the only one who could say something like that and there wouldn't be a problem."

Hull, now involved in commercial real-estate development in Raleigh, went to Wake Forest to play football. It was Packer who sold him on trying basketball, too. Packer also talked Hull into selling programs at football games. They got to keep a quarter for each one sold, and before long, Packer was figuring out ways to make extra cash. He started selling sun visors, then noticed that they were often discarded after a game. If they were in good shape, he'd collect them and resell them the following week, Hull says.

"Billy was very conscious of the dollar," Hull says.

More than three decades later, in Seattle for the 1995 Final Four, Packer was scrambling to turn junk into jewels. During an open practice session Friday, Oklahoma State's Bryant "Big Country" Reeves shattered the backboard with a dunk. Packer ran onto the court and started stuffing pieces of glass into his pockets. If the Cowboys went on to win the title, he could envision a $500,000 windfall in Big Country earrings, necklaces, pendants and the like.

Years later, Nantz asked Packer what had become of the shards, the Cowboys having lost in the semifinals.

"Are you kidding me, Jim? I threw it all in the garbage the minute Oklahoma State lost."

Not stuck in the past

With a head and hunger for business, Packer could more easily compartmentalize his life and leave one phase for the next without looking back. For example, when his college playing career ended, culminating with a Final Four appearance, his playing ended, he says. He's baffled by players from his era who still talk about being able to make jump shots.

"I mean, you gotta get over that," he says. "When I went into coaching, I got out of it. OK, that was a neat phase, you gave it what you could do, you had fun doing it, now it's time for something else."

To be exact, he gave it five seasons under Jackie Murdock and Jack McCloskey, intent on adhering to an internal deadline for making it as a head coach at a Division I school. When Memphis chose Gene Bartow over Packer for its head-coaching job, that was it. No regrets.

"I just went right back into business with another game plan," he says, one that eventually led him to broadcasting, first with the ACC network and then with NBC, which teamed him with the late Al McGuire.

"Basically, he's a coach callin' the game," Murdock says.

'Flip side of Vitale'

Will Leitch, the creator and editor of the fan Web site Deadspin, puts Packer on his imaginary Mount Rushmore of college basketball alongside former Indiana and Texas Tech coach Bob Knight, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and ESPN commentator Dick Vitale. In the national consciousness, Vitale plays the fan-friendly carnival showman to Packer's serious straight man.

Says Packer: "I'm not interested in being paraded through the student body and making a scene and stuff like that."

Sound like anyone you know?

"He really is in a lot of ways the flip side of Dick Vitale," says Leitch, 32, author of the new book "God Save the Fan." "Billy Packer, you get the sense that he would deep down rather that everyone was wearing the really tight, small shorts, and everything was just well-executed, backcourt bounce passes."

In a pop basketball culture represented by the glorification of 15-year-old superstars, individual moves and glitzy pregame shows, "I'm counterculture," Packer says.

As a basketball traditionalist, he takes pride in having been outspoken on the damage that the NBA and the lure of quick money have done to the American game, which he believes has been going downhill since 1992. That was the year Duke won the national championship with a junior- and senior-led team and the Dream Team, all of whom had spent at least three years in college, dominated the Olympics.

Now, the natural maturation process has been stunted.

"Everybody talks about, well, the rest have caught up with us," he says of international teams. "No, they didn't catch up. We went backwards."

Relaxed and engaging in the living room of the home outside Charlotte he shares with his wife (they have three grown children), he says this with no rancor, matter of factly, as if just for the sake of making conversation.

Contrary to his image of inflexibility, the natural contrarian allows that he's had a few regrets. He can think of two occasions on which he favored one side, not that it was immediately obvious on the air, but in his own mind, where most Packer performances are ultimately judged.

The first came in 1975, when he worked his first championship game and John Wooden was coaching his last for UCLA. He felt himself pulling for Wooden.

The second came a dozen years later, when he was hoping that injury-depleted Wake Forest could cling to a late lead against a superior N.C. State team. The thought bothered him so much, he says, that several days after NCSU's overtime victory he told Wolfpack coach Jim Valvano he had been rooting for Wake. Valvano's response, according to Packer: "Don't tell anybody at State, but so was I."

The traits that others find objectionable -- his decisive expertise, determined objectivity and fearless honesty -- help explain why Packer has lasted so long in television, says CBS President Sean McManus, who blames a two-year ratings decline for NCAA Tournament telecasts more on the vagaries of game matchups and lopsided scores than on the network's on-air talent.

When asked how much longer Packer would continue in his role, McManus says, "Like every year, we will sit down with Billy and [vice president] Tony Petitti at the end of the season and discuss the future." McManus declines to discuss Packer's contract in detail.

Packer, who is working 37 games this year -- 27 for CBS, says his enjoyment of basketball has not waned and he feels fine. But he recognizes that his run has to end sometime. CBS has five years left on its current contract with the NCAA, and "I'm not gonna be doin' basketball games when I'm 75 years old," he says.

When it's time to go, finally, he'll deeply miss the games, Barbara Packer says, "for a very short time," then he'll be ready to close that compartment of his life.

The following March, strangely enough, fans and critics alike may find it harder to let go.

"It wouldn't be the Final Four without Billy Packer there," Leitch says, "and it wouldn't be the Final Four without hating Billy Packer."