Leader of the Pack : Team President Bob Harlan Is Responsible for Green Bay’s Return to Glory

It took 18 years before Bob Harlan could find an available share of Packer stock to purchase for $25.

Had he been forced to wait any longer he would not have been eligible to sit on the team’s executive board and become elected president and chief operating officer of the Packers.

“I was running out of time,” admits Harlan.

It could be argued Harlan took a short cut, ensuring himself a seat at hallowed Lambeau Field each Sunday and avoiding at least a 35-year wait to purchase Packer tickets.

Sold out since 1960, the waiting list includes 26,000 names. This year five names were removed from the list.

“I look at this as trying to preserve what really is a national treasure,” Harlan says. “It’s going to be bedlam for [the] San Francisco [game tonight]. The atmosphere will be electric. As long as this place has been sold out who deserves this success more than these people?”

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Ask your local brat-belly Cheesehead--the guy who knows enough to wear the point facing forward--who is responsible for this Packer return to glory and the answer undoubtedly will be Brett Favre, or Mike Holmgren, or Ron Wolf.

Nope. Bob Harlan, the kid from Iowa who went to Marquette University and merely wanted to be a sportswriter with the crazy dream of one day becoming the Green Bay Packers’ director of public relations. Harlan never became the Packers’ public relations director. But he took command of the Packers as president in 1989, and had it not been for him, there might have been no Favre, Holmgren or Wolf.

The Packers hadn’t won a division championship since 1972. The Vince Lombardi years (1959-1967) were all these fans had. The Packers were 4-12 in 1988 before Harlan took over, 5-9 in ‘87, 4-12 in ’86 and folks here weren’t wearing those ski masks merely to protect themselves from the cold. Terrible, terrible times. Coach Bart Starr’s .409 winning percentage, Phil Bengston’s .476, Lindy Infante’s .375, and Forrest Gregg’s .404.

Dan Devine went 25-28-4 and someone killed his dog.

“I never bought a dog,” Harlan says.

No, but he took a significant risk, which while breaking from tradition--something the Packers are all about--has now put Green Bay once again into Super Bowl consideration.

“Vince Lombardi had been so successful running the entire organization that we thought everybody else could do it,” says Harlan, who began working with the Packers as an assistant general manager in 1971. “Because Vince Lombardi was so successful being the coach and general manager, I think we lived with that arrangement a little too long. We had Dan Devine do it, then we had Bart Starr do it, then Forrest Gregg.

“I think the thing that hurt Forrest and Bart was their personnel decisions just were not that sound. I can still remember the debate in the draft room when [Joe] Montana was on the board. The scout, who had covered the Midwest, literally begged Bart to take him, and he wouldn’t do it. The scout got so upset he walked out of the room and slammed the door. We ended up taking a running back from Maryland and a nose tackle from Maryland. I don’t remember either name, and they certainly retired a long time ago.”

Harlan broke from Lombardi tradition and dismissed Tom Braatz, executive vice president, in 1991, who had a 50-50 power setup with Coach Lindy Infante. Although advised he could not lure Wolf, a former personnel lieutenant for Al Davis and the Raiders who was working for the Jets, Harlan did so. The Packers now had a football general, and a head coach would answer to Wolf.

“He joined us on Dec. 1 for a game at Atlanta, dropped off his briefcase and said he wanted to go on the field and look at a young backup quarterback for the Falcons,” Harlan says. “He came back upstairs and said we were going to trade for Brett Favre in the off-season. I didn’t know who he was talking about.

“We came back from Atlanta and he goes down to the practice field on Monday, comes back an hour later and said, ‘You’ve got a problem on your practice field. It’s a country club atmosphere down there. They’re 4-10 and they’re walking around like they’re 10-4. We’ve got to change that.’ I thought at that moment that Lindy Infante was in trouble.”

Infante, the coach of the Packers, had just been given a three-year contract extension. Wolf said a change was in order, and Harlan, who had promised Wolf complete control, dismissed Infante. Infante, in turn, opted to stay out of football for the following three years to force the Packers to pay him the nearly $2 million they owed him.

“We were always sold out and the feeling here was we didn’t care if we won or lost,” Harlan says. “They couldn’t say that after we released Infante with three years left on his contract.”

Infante had driven the Packers to a 10-6 record in Harlan’s first year as president on the strength of quarterback Dan Majkowski’s magic, but Harlan considered it a mirage, and Green Bay fell to 6-10 and 4-12 the following two seasons.

“I think Wolf saved the franchise,” Harlan says. “I truly believe that. He restored respect for this franchise. He found Mike Holmgren right away. A lot of other teams wanted Mike Holmgren and Mike told me that one of the chief reasons he came to Green Bay was because he knew in Ron Wolf he had someone who could get him players.”

Holmgren could have gone to the Arizona Cardinals or the New York Jets and been both coach and general manager, but he went to the Packers.

“The idea that two heads are better than one is very true at this particular time,” Holmgren says. “I had my hands full coaching the team. I didn’t need to make every bottom-line personnel decision.”

A month after hiring Holmgren, who had been the 49ers’ offensive coordinator, Wolf traded for Favre. A year later the Packers convinced Reggie White, the most sought-after player in free-agent history, to take up residence in Green Bay, thereby giving the Packers the credibility they needed to pursue additional players.

“It’s obvious why we’re better; there’s just no question,” Harlan says. “Ron Wolf and Mike Holmgren.”

Harlan, meanwhile, never goes on the field. When Wolf hired Holmgren, Harlan stayed in his office rather than appear at the news conference to avoid stealing the spotlight from Wolf. “Holmgren was Ron’s hire,” Harlan says.

When the games begin, “I’m a wreck,” he says. In the fourth quarter he walks outside, listens to the crowd and then returns to see why they have made noise. “I’ve missed a lot of fourth quarters,” he says. “I get nervous. I feel if things aren’t going well, if I start moving around they will go better.”

The worst possible thing that could happen to Harlan, however, has been rumored in recent days: Wolf’s departure back to New York to straighten out the Jets after this season. Wolf denies it, and Reggie White says, “I can’t see it; Ron Wolf has the best job in football because he can do whatever he wants.”

Wolf has no eccentric owner to answer to a la Jerry Jones, Robert Irsay or Al Davis. Harlan’s the boss, and only because it says so on his door.

“There are certain places I belong and certain places I don’t belong,” Harlan says. “This is Ron and Mike’s team, and the last thing in the world I’m ever going to do is suggest anything to those two gentlemen.”

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The people own the Packers. There are 4,634 shares owned by 1,898 people. The Miller Brewing Company owns the most with 200 because of founder Fred Miller’s love for area sports. Harlan has his one share framed and hanging in his house.

The Packers’ nonprofit status goes back to 1922, when a group of Green Bay businessmen formed the Green Bay Football Corp. to keep the Packers going, three years after the Indian Packing Co. started the franchise. In 1950, stock was sold at $25 a share to keep the team from financially collapsing. Forty-six years later the stock still sells for $25 a share. No dividends. No interest. All money goes back into capital improvements and the team.

“I have one share,” Wolf says. “It was part of my deal to come here.”

If the franchise ever went out of business, its bylaws call for all debts to be paid and the remainder of the money to go to the Sullivan-Wallen American Legion Post in Green Bay, for a war memorial.

“There’ll never be a community investment like with this team,” Harlan says. “It’s almost more fiction than reality.”

Harlan, unlike the 29 men and woman who own their NFL franchises, answers to a 45-man board of directors and executive committee of seven. Go ahead, try to gain a consensus in quick order on spending $17.2 million to sign White or make good on the money owed to Infante to hire some guy who has never been a head coach.

Jerry Jones snaps his finger, and it happens. The Packers, playing in a 37-year-old stadium, are no threat to leave, but how will they survive against the likes of Dallas and other skybox-driven teams?

“We continue to exist for two reasons,” Harlan says. “Sixty-three percent of our revenue comes from TV and the second reason is the salary cap, which limits free agency. If we had total free agency, we couldn’t survive.

“Our team treasurer says if we did a Deion-and-a-half deal we’d be finished.”

The Packers, who turned a $5-million profit last season--best in franchise history--have about $20 million in cash reserves. Jones paid Sanders a $13-million signing bonus, and a $15-million signing bonus to running back Emmitt Smith.

“We’ve decided not to put our money into concrete anymore, and put it in players now,” says Harlan. The Packers have spent $45 million in the last decade upgrading facilities, including the construction of a new practice facility.

Finding the players will be up to Wolf, while Harlan concentrates on Packer tradition. Telephone the Packers asking to speak to him, and he answers his own phone.

“When I go out, though, I wear the glasses and the hat because I go to the grocery store and I’m there all night talking about the Packers,” Harlan says. “There have been a lot of hard times--it wasn’t much fun in the ‘80s and I remember coming out after one game and finding two of our tires flat--but these people are the best in football.”

Two years ago Harlan made a move, the toughest decision in his tenure as president, to take the Packers out of Milwaukee. For 62 years, the Packers played as many as three games a year there.

“We were losing $2.5 million a year because of playing in County Stadium,” he says. “You sit in a board meeting and you hear your treasurer report this and you see people start to roll their eyes and you can see the trouble coming.”

Unlike other owners who simply packed their moving vans and took off, Harlan refused to totally abandon Milwaukee-area Packer fans. He offered Milwaukee fans a season-ticket package to games in Green Bay, which included one exhibition game and the second and sixth opponent on their Lambeau Field schedule each year. Ninety-seven percent of the season-ticket holders in Milwaukee, many of whom who had never been to Green Bay, bought the package.

So now in Green Bay, the team plays before two entirely different groups of fans. The Green Bay season-ticket holders get six games, and the Milwaukee fans, who had not been treated to the Packer-Bear rivalry in County Stadium since 1974, will be there this year for Game No. 6 on the home schedule.

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The Packers have made the playoffs three consecutive seasons, and that hadn’t happened since Lombardi roamed the frozen tundra. Including tonight, they will have been on Monday night TV twice this season at Lambeau Field, the first time they have appeared here on Monday night since 1986. The nation is watching players jump into the stands with the kind of enthusiasm only witnessed on the college level. And they’re loving it as evidenced by the number of people willing to slap a piece of cheese on their head.

A year ago they had the fourth-quarter lead on Dallas before losing in the NFC championship game. This year, they are most people’s pick to be playing in the Super Bowl in New Orleans, and if successful, Harlan will be standing in the background, shoving Holmgren and Wolf forward to accept the Lombardi Trophy.

“It’s going to get tougher and tougher to keep this great tradition going,” Harlan says. “The have-nots are becoming powers now because they are moving to new cities. We’re the only team in the league that’s not moving. But we’ve got to get some more help.

“I worry where we’ll be 10, 15, 20, 30 years down the road. I want to make sure there’s always a Green Bay Packers team playing at Lambeau Field. As volatile as pro sports is today, you can’t say that; you have to work on it.”