Bob Harlan: Fighting to stay competitive

Continued from previous week

“Five years after (Ron Wolf) and (Mike) Holmgren get here, we go to the Super Bowl and we win it,” recalled Harlan about the Super Bowl XXXI win against the New England Patriots.

The Packers then returned to Super Bowl XXXII the following year, but lost to the Denver Broncos.

“We should have won that too,” Harlan added.

“After 24 years of mediocrity, we’ve now had 33 straight years of great football in Green Bay. We have maybe three of the greatest quarterbacks — certainly in (Brett) Favre and (Aaron) Rodgers, we’ve got great quarterbacks, but Love is still questionable, but we’ll find out.

“It’s been a remarkable thing to see.”

Then, in 2000, Harlan announced the team’s plans to renovate Lambeau Field, which wouldn’t be funded by 0.5% sales tax increase in Brown County, which went to referendum.

“If we’d lost that, we would have been in trouble,” Harlan said.

The impetus behind the referendum-supported renovation dates back to eight years earlier and the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

It was revolutionary in establishing a new “retro-classic” design model for MLB ballparks that replaced large, multi-purpose stadiums with more intimate, baseball-centric venues.

It triggered a wave of similar sports venue construction in the subsequent decades, incorporating the use of urban settings, modern amenities and old-fashioned aesthetics.

“In 1992, the Orioles opened Camden Yards in Baltimore. They showed everybody that you can build these great old red brick buildings with the nice gates and they can look like the old ball parks; and you put the amenities in, you private boxes, club seats, stadium club, team store, whatever you want to put in there, and you can be very successful,” Harlan explained.

“So all at once, the stadium became the No. 1 issue, not just in baseball, but in basketball and football too. I had been going to league meetings since 1977, and I don’t think anyone had ever talked about a stadium at all; but in 1992, it became the No. 1 subject in the NFL and every other sport.

“Every time a team in the NFL moved into a new stadium, it jumped ahead of the Packers for revenue. We were rapidly falling to the bottom of the league, so we talked briefly in the late 90s about adding a stadium club toward the end zone at Lambeau, and we still realized that where that revenue had to come from, that would never be enough.”

To be continued