Bob Harlan, formerly of the Green Bay Packers, is the father of Kevin Harlan, an American TV and radio sports announcer. He covers NBA games for TNT and CBS. He covers NFL and college basketball games for CBS.
He has also been running NBA play-by-play for 37 years. 2022 will be his 38th consecutive NFL play-by-play season. He was twice named National Sportscaster of the Year.
He has created play-by-play commentary for one of the four major sports in the third most popular network sports coverage of all time.
Harlan is The Athletic’s Sports Broadcaster of the Year 2019 for doing great work for three different media outlets each week.
A sports announcer, Kevin Harlan has a huge net worth of $1 million
According to CelebrityNetWorth.com, an American radio and television sports reporter has made $1 million over his 30-year career in the sports industry.
In 1982, he began his radio and television career as an announcer for the NBA’s Kansas City Kings.
By 2008, Harlan was the voice of Westwood One Radio’s coverage of the Final Four. After calling Super Bowl XLV, he became the lead commentator for Westwood One’s Monday Night Football in 2010.
He has spoken on Super Bowls XLV through XLVI for Westwood One in a streak of 12 broadcasts, the longest broadcast in television and radio broadcast history.
Harlan also showed the HD stream of CBS’ Super Bowl XXXV game in 2001. Since 2003, he has also credited preseason games for his hometown team, the Packers, on the team’s national television network.
In 2017 and 2019, his peers gave him the National Sportscaster of the Year award. Harlan has screened both the Final Four and the Super Bowl 13 times.
Along with Dick Stockton and Marv Albert, he is one of only three sports commentators to have appeared on more than 3,000 shows on the national network during their careers.
Harlan makes $400,000 a year as a sports reporter
According to Clutchpoint, Harlan makes $400,000 a year as a sports reporter.
Everyone knows Kevin Harlan as the voice of Monday Night Football and for his analysis of the Super Bowl. Harlan is currently the play-by-play announcer for the NFL and NCAA men’s basketball tournaments on CBS Sports.
He may also have made a living as a broadcaster for Tuner Sports, where Charles Barkley, another NBA pundit, is said to make about $1.5 million a year.
Although Kevin may not have made as much money as Barkley, his salary and other earnings can be close to a million dollars.
Barkley, on the other hand, has a long list of amazing accomplishments that show how hard he works on and off the court. He used to play professional basketball and won awards. Now he’s a well-known NBA analyst.
Harlan’s first radio job was at his high school radio station
Harlan started naming the boys’ basketball, soccer, and hockey games at Our Lady of Premontre High School when he was in high school. He did this on WGBP-FM, the school’s radio network. He was recently inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.
Harlan worked as a ball boy for the Green Bay Packers as a teenager. His father, Bob Harlan, was an executive of the team.
Kevin had planned to pursue a communications or mass media degree at the University of Notre Dame or the University of Wisconsin-Madison. However, broadcaster Gary Bender asked Kevin’s father, Bob, to enroll Kevin in the University of Kansas’ School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
When Tom Hedrick, the main spokesman for the Jayhawks’ basketball play-by-play announcers, met Harlan, he could immediately tell that the young man loved sports coverage and had a lot of potential.
In Harlan’s freshman year, Hedrick gave him a job on the sidelines, then promoted him to his assistant and backup speaker when he had other things to do. In the same vein, Harlan earned a degree in broadcast journalism in 1982.
The radio sports announcer became the voice of the NBA’s Kansas City Kings
Harlan joined the Kansas City Kings (now the Sacramento Kings) radio and television team in 1982 when he was 22 and fresh out of college.
After a year of calling basketball games for his alma mater, the University of Kansas, he spent several years as a student hosting before and after game programs. He then named games for the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs from 1985 to 1993.
Harlan also called for basketball and football games at the University of Missouri from 1986 to 1989 and was the play-by-play announcer for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves for nine years (1989–98).
Harlan called 1991 NFL football games on NBC, 1992-93 college football games on ESPN, and NFL games on Fox from 1994-1997.
His broadcast studio in his basement in 2020
Kevin Harlan spent a lot of time in his furnished basement in 2020 as COVID spread like wildfire.
The Turner Sports announcer used to stand at places like the American Airlines Arena in Miami or the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Now Harlan is announcing NBA games from the basement of his century-old home in Mission Hills, Kansas. It is 15 feet by 8 feet tall.
The Athletic says a seven-foot-tall “NBA on TNT” banner hung behind Harlan when he called games.
Then there were two 32-inch monitors on a rectangular folding table in front of Harlan, who was seated in a Pottery Barn chair that his wife, Ann, had bought for a table in the basement.
During games, a laptop was placed in front of Harlan so he could see the official result of his game right from the arena.
A sportscaster’s 100-year-old home in Mission Hills
The Athletic says Harlan had already set up a home office for his work on the NBA 2K video game series when the COVID outbreak took place.
He keeps his recording equipment, which includes laptops and game consoles, in a large closet in the back of the master bedroom. From there, he can see two other game voice actors, Doris Burke and Clark Kellogg, while he’s recording.
But the Harlans realized that Turner’s plans would require a lot more space than just a closet.
Also, two guys from CNN’s multimedia field team came down from Atlanta and worked hard for four days to set up Harlan’s home studio. Harlan said he had two field technicians with him in his basement when he called his first preseason game.
The 62-year-old took over for Marv Albert at Turner Sports
Sports Business Journal says Kevin Harlan has hired Marv Albert as play-by-play announcer for Turner Sports’ broadcast of the NBA Western Conference Finals.
In 1996, he began working for Turner Sports to cover NBA playoff games. In 1997 he began naming games for the whole season and he still does today.
Harlan has “verbally built scenes for spectators and listeners on the greatest sports stages”. He has announced 13 Super Bowl radio games and five Final Four games.
Additionally, Harlan was “thrilled” about getting Stan Van Gundy, even though he and Reggie Miller worked well together and got along well.
The Harlans earn their living and build their careers in the sports industry
Kevin’s family is all about sports, as his father was the director of sports information at Marquette University for many years. On the other hand, his daughter Olivia works part-time as a reporter and Sam Dekker, who is married to Olivia, plays basketball.
Samuel Thomas Dekker, who is married to her, plays professional basketball for the London Lions in the British Basketball League (BBL) and EuroCup.
She has also covered SEC and ACC football games for FOX Sports South and Raycom, and reported on the sidelines during preseason games for the Packers TV Network. Olivia also co-hosted a daily web show about Green Bay Packers training camp.
Olivia Harlan and her father, Kevin, became the first father-daughter duo to call an NFL game together. Olivia was the side reporter and Kevin was the announcer.
His father runs the Green Bay Packers as CEO
Robert E. Harlan was formerly the team’s chairman and CEO. The Green Bay Packers are an American soccer team.
In 1971, Harlan began working for the Green Bay Packers as an assistant general manager.
Over the next 18 years, he was promoted three times: first to general manager of the company in 1975, then to assistant to the president in 1981, and finally to executive vice president of administration in 1988.
During his tenure as president, he made “some of the biggest changes in franchise history.” This made him one of the “most powerful and successful presidents in franchise history”.
The Madeline and Robert Harlan Humanitarian Fund was established by Madeline and Robert Harlan.
The Journal Sentinel says that Bob and Madeline Harlan have lived in Green Bay since the early 1960s and are very involved in the community.
The Harlans founded the Madeline and Robert Harlan Humanitarian Fund to help people with cancer who don’t have insurance. The idea for this fund arose from the fact that Harlan was diagnosed with melanoma in 2003 and subsequently treated.
In addition, they worked hard to raise money for the emergency rooms and cancer treatment centers at St. Mary’s and St. Vincent’s Hospitals, where they served on several boards and committees. A plaza was built in St. Mary’s in honor of Madeline Harlan.
She also went to school to be a registered nurse, and during her clinical stints at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, she worked with nurses who cared for patients as much as she did.