Bob Harlan was there for everybody, but especially the Green Bay Packers

GREEN BAY – There will be a tribute to the life and career of longtime Green Bay Packers president Bob Harlan.

But it will be hard to beat the one Harlan received on Sept. 12, 2000, at Stadium View sports bar.

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After months of a grueling campaign to convince Brown County residents to approve a 0.5% sales tax that would allow the Packers to renovate Lambeau Field and secure their financial future, Harlan drove over from the stadium to join the victory party after the results came in.

As he walked through the back door and into the bar area, the crowd began chanting, “Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Bob.”

“It was really a special, special time,” said Mark Schiefelbein, former director of football administration and communications. “You could see after it was done, just the relief that came over Bob, because he used to say, there is no plan B. There’s nothing to fall back on.

“I mean, he went door to door to talk to people. I remember him getting up at 4 a.m. and going to some of the factories here that had a shift change, and he'd be down there shaking hands. And going, ‘Hi, I'm Bob Harlan. Hope you vote yes.’ He literally put everything he had into it.”

Harlan passed away March 5 at St. Mary’s Hospital in Green Bay at the age of 89.

His legacy won’t soon be forgotten.

Except for that one time when he set out to convince the public the Packers were worth investing tax dollars in, Harlan operated behind the scenes. He served as Packers president for 19 years and was responsible for hiring the two general managers, Ron Wolf and Ted Thompson, who led the franchise to its last two Super Bowls.

Harlan forever will be remembered as the man who hired Wolf and gave him full autonomy over football operations.

The two had met in 1987 when Wolf interviewed for the franchise’s first director of football operations position. Harlan was not in charge, Judge Robert Parins was, but the meeting would be critical to the Packers’ fortunes.

“It was a bad time to come to Green Bay, there was snow, and I was delayed in Chicago for a long time,” Wolf remembered. “Bob met me at the airport somewhere around 11:30 at night. We went to Denny's and sat there, because it was open all night, and talked for a good two, three hours. I was amazed that he would do that.”

Parins hired Braatz for the position, but when Harlan succeeded Parins as club president in 1989, he began reshaping the way the Packers did business. At the time Braatz and coach Lindy Infante shared authority on all things football-related, and the setup was not working.

What’s more, the Packers were a nonprofit organization and had a board of directors and executive committee mostly made up of local businessmen. The executive committee had tremendous influence over the organization and Harlan wanted to separate them from the on-field operation.

“I thought he saw 17 years of dysfunction, and when he tried to get that job, he knew exactly what he wanted to do,” said Harlan’s son, Bryan. “He knew exactly how he wanted to reorganize it. He had thought about if he ever got the position how he would restructure everything and make it more football-oriented and take away the non-football people on the board making decisions.”

Harlan gave Wolf full authority and he wanted him to have full control of the football team. When Wolf came to him in early 1992 to say that he wanted to trade for Brett Favre, Harlan had a problem.

According to Bryan Harlan, there was a policy that the executive committee had to approve trading a first-round pick before it could be done. Harlan didn’t know if it would take a first-round pick to obtain Favre, but he said it was possible.

And he told them that he trusted Wolf and that they needed to go along with it.

“They told my dad, ‘You better be right,’” Bryan Harlan said. “I mean, my dad knew that he pushed all his chips in the middle."

Wolf had hired Mike Holmgren to be head coach and was fully on board with the acquisition of Favre. But he had no idea what risk Harlan was taking by telling the executive committee they needed to go along with him.

“I didn’t know that,” Holmgren said. “That’s great. That’s the real, big step he took. When he hired Ron, he really gave him the reins. He really stuck by his guns.

“I’ve got a picture on my desk of the three of us holding the Super Bowl trophy. And you know, that always sticks in my mind. In the later years, when I think about Bob and I look at the picture, I just think he was there. He was there for us. But he was there for the Packers."

When Wolf wanted to sign Reggie White to what then was an enormous contract (four years, $16 million), Harlan went along with it. But no one really expected White to sign with the Packers and so the money part wasn’t that big of an issue.

Harlan had hired Mike Reinfeldt, a Wisconsin kid who became an All-Pro safety for the Houston Oilers before working in the Oakland Raiders’ front office, to be his chief financial officer. Reinfeldt’s job was to negotiate a deal with White’s agent, Jimmy Sexton.

The numbers went through the roof, but there was no salary cap that year and Reinfeldt thought the structure was manageable. He also thought the Packers had the wherewithal to make the investment.

“Bob brought me to Green Bay, so in my life, he’s a very important man,” Reinfeldt said. “I negotiated the contract but I also had the CFO hat on, so I had to consider everything. I told Bob that I can get this done.

“So, he looks at me and he says, ‘Can we afford it?’ I say, ‘Yeah.’ I mean, that's my other hat. I'm saying he relied on me to tell him that the money was OK, and that’s Bob. He let people do their job.”

Holmgren said that while Harlan was in charge, he never acted like an owner. He never wanted to get involved in football decisions. He counted on hiring the right people and letting them make the decisions.

But he said Harlan was there for everybody.

“He let us do the football stuff,” Holmgren said. “About once a week he’d come down to the office and say, ‘What can I do for you? How can I help? And when that's coming from a leader – and he was the leader – but he showed a lot of wisdom.

“I’ve seen it, and we’ve all seen it with other organizations, it might even be an owner that comes in, buys a team, and then all of a sudden he's going to say all this stuff instead of just hiring somebody that he trusts.”

Harlan’s way of doing business endured for a while. Mark Murphy, who proceeded Harlan, allowed Thompson to run the football side of things until Thompson stepped down. Then he had the coach, general manager and financial officer report to him.

New President and CEO Ed Policy has not given the general manager total authority and made the decision to extend coach Matt LaFleur’s contract. The Packers have not won a Super Bowl since the new model was constructed.

Even with all the success the Packers have had since Harlan hired Wolf, the thing most people will remember most about Harlan was his friendliness, humility, sense of humor and total commitment to the fans.

Harlan, a journalism major and Marquette graduate, was in public relations before he became an NFL executive. He was Marquette’s sports information director and later was public relations director for the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball team.

When he got to the Packers, he was an expert at public relations and was committed to making the organization a partner with the community. He famously answered his own phone during his entire tenure with the club and often visited with fans at the stadium and around town.

Seattle general manager John Schneider, who grew up in Green Bay and later worked under Wolf and Thompson in the personnel department, remembered suffering an injury in high school during a game in which his team faced the one Bryan Harlan and his brothers were attending.

Schneider missed several games and his mother thought that getting to see Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton, his hero, would lift his spirits. She called Harlan, and he made sure Schneider got to see the Packers play the Bears.

“Bob loved the high school sports scene,” Schneider said. “He basically got me and my dad, like these handicap passes so I could go watch the game on the field. And we’re in these little stands on the sideline and we’re watching Walter Payton.

“Like, it was like the coolest thing.”

The same kid later played a part in the Packers drafting Aaron Rodgers.

Bryan Harlan said he remembered his dad telling him that Thompson came out of the draft room and told Bob Harlan that he was thinking of a drafting a quarterback despite having Favre. Harlan told him he trusted him but that he was probably going to take a lot of grief over it. He told Thompson not to worry about it, he would take the flak.

“When the draft was over, [Thompson] was sitting in the room and Bob came over and he said, ‘We're the only two in the room.' He was like, ‘So, did you go to [see Rodgers at] Cal?’ And [Thompson] was like, 'yeah, actually, I did.'

“He's like, ‘He's good, right? He's going to be good, right?’ [Thompson said] ‘Bob, he's going to be awesome. He should have been a top five pick for sure. Like, maybe the first pick in the draft.' [Harlan] put his hand on [Thompson's] shoulder. And then he walked out of the room.”

Harlan oversaw the Packers renaissance and along the way touched a lot of people. His legacy will endure.

“Bob Harlan is the definition of what the Green Bay Packers embody,” former Packers coach Mike McCarthy said in a statement. “The foundation for continuous decades of success falls directly at his feet – and heart.”

This article originally appeared on Packers News: Bob Harlan's Packers legacy of humility, heart will endure

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