Bob Harlan, a savvy former president of the Green Bay Packers who helped the franchise overcome the long malaise that followed the retirement of its revered coach Vince Lombardi by steering it toward two Super Bowl championships and developing a plan to renovate its venerable stadium, Lambeau Field, died on March 5 in Green Bay, Wis. He was 89.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by respiratory issues, said his son Kevin, an N.F.L. broadcaster for CBS Sports.
The Packers, who play in the smallest city with a National Football League team, are unique in professional sports. Instead of a billionaire owner, the team is a nonprofit corporation publicly owned by about a half-million shareholders — virtually all of them fans. Their 5.2 million shares cannot be publicly traded and yield no dividends.
“Our job description is the preservation of a national treasure,” Mr. Harlan said at a conference called the Sports Summit in 1996.
He added, “We’re a very warm story in a very cold city.”
From 1989 to 2008, Mr. Harlan occupied, to some degree, the place of an owner, overseeing the Packers’ football and business operations and being a public figure as its president. He came from a publicity background, and brought to his job an avuncular, positive demeanor.
“Encounters with him always made you feel better,” said Andrew Brandt, a vice president of player finance under Mr. Harlan. “He had an internally sanguine outlook.”
Mr. Harlan joined the Packers in 1971, three years after Lombardi retired as coach. Lombardi had led the Packers to their second consecutive Super Bowl championship in 1968, but after his departure, mediocrity followed for nearly three decades.
The Packers’ makeover started in late 1991, when Mr. Harlan hired Ron Wolf as general manager. Mr. Wolf rebuilt the team with critical moves like signing Mike Holmgren as coach; trading for Brett Favre, then a backup quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons; and signing the free agent defensive end Reggie White to a four-year, $17 million contract.
The team quickly became a contender. After finishing the 1996 regular season with a 13-3 record, the Packers beat the New England Patriots, 35-21, in the Super Bowl, held in the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans. The Packers again had a 13-3 record in 1997 but lost the Super Bowl, held in San Diego, to the Denver Broncos, 31-24.
By then, Mr. Harlan was looking to the franchise’s financial future. In 1994, he ended an arrangement in which the team played three games a season at County Stadium in Milwaukee, which caused $2.5 million in losses a year. And in 1997 and ’98, he helped engineer a stock sale that brought in more than $20 million dedicated to renovating Lambeau Field.
But the Packers needed more than a stadium upgrade to keep up with the revenues that other teams, with their deep-pocketed owners, were amassing in much larger markets. The franchise was coming close to tapping its cash reserve; players’ costs were escalating; and by 2000, the organization was losing money.
Mr. Harlan proposed a $295 million project that would add nearly 12,000 seats to the stadium, new scoreboards and an atrium with a restaurant, a pro shop, a team Hall of Fame and space for year-round events.
Mark Murphy, a former defensive back for the Washington Redskins (now the Commanders) who succeeded Mr. Harlan as the Packers’ president in early 2008, said in an interview, “When I played a game at Lambeau, it was nothing special: just a big, green box.”
To pay for the stadium expansion, the team planned to use money from the stock sale and proceeds from personal seat licensee fees charged to season ticket holders.
But the critical source of revenues was to come from the passage of a referendum to raise about $160 million through a 0.5 percent sales tax in Brown County, where Green Bay is located.
To persuade fans to vote for the tax, Mr. Harlan and other front office executives knocked on doors. “In football-mad Green Bay, it wasn’t an easy sell,” Mr. Brandt said. “We had doors closed in our faces.”
Kevin Harlan said that his father had greeted factory workers as they started and left their shifts. “Some people would ignore him,” he said. “The stress on him was immense.”
The measure passed in 2000 with about 53 percent of the vote in favor, and construction was completed in 2003. Outside the stadium, in a plaza named for Mr. Harlan, stand statues of Lombardi and Curly Lambeau, a founder of the Packers who won six N.F.L championships as their coach from 1929 to 1944.
Robert Ernest Harlan was born on Sept. 9, 1936, in Des Moines. His father, Ernest, was a bookkeeper, and his mother, Alice (Fex) Harlan, managed the home.
Bob was a Packers fan growing up. When he was a freshman at Marquette University in Milwaukee, in 1954, he and three classmates sneaked into City Stadium, Lambeau’s predecessor, to see his first professional game
“I was hooked on this team before I ever got here,” Mr. Harlan told The Green Bay Press-Gazette in 2003.
After graduating from Marquette with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1958, and with an aspiration to be a sports columnist, he worked briefly as a reporter in the Milwaukee bureau of United Press International. He detoured into public relations when he returned to Marquette in the fall of 1959 as its sports information director. He left six years later to join the St. Louis Cardinals as that baseball team’s director of community relations; he was later its head of public relations.
He remained in St. Louis until 1971, when he joined the Packers as an assistant general manager and rose to corporate general manager, assistant to the president, and executive vice president before being named president and chief executive in 1989.
The Packers were perennially competitive and usually played in the postseason during Mr. Harlan’s time as president. For a time, Mike Sherman was both head coach and general manager, but Mr. Harlan did not like having one man in the two jobs, and in 2005 he chose Ted Thompson as general manager, while retaining Mr. Sherman as coach. Mr. Thompson was a vice president of the Seattle Seahawks and had been Green Bay’s director of player personnel under Mr. Wolf, the general manager in the 1990s.
“Ron used to rely on Ted a lot,” Mr. Harlan told The Press-Gazette in 2015. “He’d always say, ‘Ted, what are you thinking?’ and he always listened to his opinion.”
Mr. Thompson chose the quarterback Aaron Rodgers in the first round of the 2005 draft; after backing up Favre for three seasons, Rodgers grew into a franchise quarterback who passed for three touchdowns in Green Bay’s 31-25 Super Bowl win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2011 at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
In addition to his son Kevin, Mr. Harlan is survived by his wife, Madeline (Kieler) Harlan, whom he married in 1959; two other sons, Bryan and Michael; four grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Mr. Harlan could get emotional about the Packers. Six years after they beat the Carolina Panthers, 30-13, to win the National Football Conference championship in 1997, he told The Press Gazette, “I have trouble to this day talking about what went on in this stadium on January 12th of ’97.”
On that frigid, three-degree day, with the wind chill well below zero, the Packers’ victory sent them to their first Super Bowl since 1968.
“I start breaking up on it,” he said. “These things mean a lot to me.”
