Bob Harlan: A Milwaukee blueprint

Continued from previous week

“I have great admiration for the way Bud Selig runs his baseball team. Like his move to hire Harry Dalton. That seemed to make that club a contender immediately. Yet Bud stayed out of the playing,” Bob Harlan told the Milwaukee Journal’s Pete Faust upon being hired in June 1989.

“He’s run it as a good, solid organization and he built very capable people around him. I want to do the same thing here. I think that’s the president’s role. I hope I can do as good a job here as Bud has down in Milwaukee. I think he’s a very good role model.

“It’s not going to turn around immediately because of the president. It’s going to turn around because of the people who run your football operations, no matter if it’s the Packer organization or the San Francisco 49ers and Chicago Bears.”

Harlan also told media that he wanted to move the Packers forward “in every way.”

And looking back from 2025, Harlan can feel a sense of accomplishment in doing just that.

“Certainly in football,” Harlan said. “We moved ahead in revenue. We moved ahead in prestige.

“A lot of people were responsible for this now, but it did happen. We got it done, but it had to be done. I mean, I was confident we could do it because I had watched it for 18 years. And, like I said, I won’t put anybody down because those are brilliant businessmen who gave their time to run this franchise, and God love them, but they weren’t football people. So he had to make a change. We had to say, ‘We are going to take a totally different structure, we’re gonna make this sucker run. And it did.’”

And much of that was the result of the change in football operations and key hirings.

“I tell you who I give a lot of credit to,” Bud Selig told author Michael Bauman in Ron Wolf and the Green Bay Packers. “It’s Bob Harlan, because Bob hired Ron and gave him free rein.”

In 1990, Selig was named to the Packers Board of Directors.

“There was something about him; he was a no-nonsense type of guy. He was in Green Bay, and he was there to do a job, as you well know. But I got to see it up close, at board meetings and other things. I really liked him a lot.”

To be continued