Bob Harlan, who used to work for the Green Bay Packers, is the father of Kevin Harlan, an American TV and radio sports announcer. He reports on NBA games for both TNT and CBS. For CBS, he covers NFL and college basketball games.
He has also been doing NBA play-by-play for 37 years. In 2022, he will do NFL play-by-play for the 38th season in a row. He has twice been named the National Sportscaster of the Year.
He has done play-by-play commentary for one of the four main sports on the third most network sports broadcasts of all time.
Harlan is The Athletic’s Sports Broadcaster of the Year for 2019 because he does great work every week for three different media sites.
As a sports announcer, Kevin Harlan has a huge $1 million net worth
CelebrityNetWorth.com says that an American sportscaster for radio and TV has made $1 million over the course of his 30-year career in the sports industry.
In 1982, he started his career in radio and TV broadcasting as the voice of the NBA team the Kansas City Kings.
Up until 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 talked about Super Bowls XLV through XLVI for Westwood One in a row of 12 broadcasts, which is the longest run in the history of TV and radio networks.
Harlan also showed the HD stream of the Super Bowl XXXV game from CBS in 2001. Since 2003, he has also been calling preseason games for his hometown team, the Packers, on the team’s statewide TV network.
In 2017 and 2019, his colleagues gave him the National Sportscaster of the Year award. Harlan has shown both the Final Four and the Super Bowl 13 times.
He is one of only three sportscasters, along with Dick Stockton and Marv Albert, to have been on more than 3,000 national network broadcasts during their careers.
Harlan makes $400,000 a year as a sportscaster
Clutchpoint says that Harlan makes $400,000 every year as a sportscaster.
Everyone knows Kevin Harlan as the voice of Monday Night Football and for his analysis of the Super Bowl. Harlan is the play-by-play announcer for the NFL and NCAA Men’s Basketball tournaments on CBS Sports right now.
He might have also made a good living as a broadcaster for Tuner Sports, where Charles Barkley, another NBA expert, is said to make about $1.5 million a year.
Even though Kevin may not have made as much money as Barkley, his salary and other earnings may 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 win awards. Now, he is a well-known NBA analyst.
Harlan’s first job in radio was at his high school radio station
Harlan started calling Our Lady of Premontre High School boys’ basketball, football, and ice hockey games when he was in high school. He did this on WGBP-FM, the school’s radio network. He was recently given a place in the school’s Hall of Fame.
Harlan worked as a ball boy for the Green Bay Packers when he was a teenager. His father, Bob Harlan, was an executive for the team.
Kevin had planned to get a degree in communications or mass media from either 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 School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas.
When the Jayhawks’ main basketball play-by-play announcer, Tom Hedrick, met Harlan, he could tell right away that the young man loved sports broadcasting and had a lot of potential.
In Harlan’s first year, Hedrick gave him a job on the sidelines and then promoted him to be his assistant and fill-in announcer when he had other things to do. In the same way, Harlan got a degree in broadcast journalism in 1982.
The sports announcer on the radio became the voice of the Kansas City Kings of the NBA
Harlan joined the radio and TV team for the Kansas City Kings (now the Sacramento Kings) in 1982, when he was 22 years old and had just finished college.
After calling basketball games for his alma mater, the University of Kansas, for a year, he spent several years as an undergraduate hosting and making programs for before and after games. After that, he called games for the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL from 1985 to 1993.
Harlan also called basketball and football games at the University of Missouri from 1986 to 1989 and was the play-by-play announcer for the Minnesota Timberwolves of the NBA for nine years (1989–98).
Harlan called NFL football games on NBC in 1991, college football games on ESPN from 1992 to 1993, and NFL games on Fox from 1994 to 1997.
His broadcast studio in his basement in 2020
Kevin Harlan spent a lot of time in his furnished basement in 2020, when COVID was spreading like wildfire.
The Turner Sports announcer used to be courtside at places like the American Airlines Arena in Miami or the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Now, Harlan announces NBA games from the basement of his century-old home in Mission Hills, Kansas. It is 15 feet by 8 feet.
The Athletic says that there was an eight-foot “NBA on TNT” banner behind Harlan when he was calling games.
Then, there were two 32-inch monitors on a rectangular folding table in front of Harlan, who was sitting in a Pottery Barn chair that his wife Ann had bought for a basement table.
During games, a laptop computer was set up in front of Harlan so that he could see the official score of his match right from the arena.
The 100-Year-Old Home of a Sportscaster in Mission Hills
The Athletic says that Harlan already had a home office set up for his work on the NBA 2K video game series when the COVID outbreak happened.
He sets up his recording gear, which includes laptops and game consoles, in the back of a large closet outside the main bedroom. From there, he can see two other game announcers, Doris Burke and Clark Kellogg, as he records.
But the Harlans realized that Turner’s plans would need a lot more space than just a closet.
Also, two people from CNN’s multimedia field engineering team came from Atlanta and worked hard for four days to set up Harlan’s home studio. Harlan said he had two field engineers with him in his basement when he called his first preseason game.
The 62-year-old took over for Marv Albert at Turner Sports
The Sports Business Journal says that Kevin Harlan took over for Marv Albert as the play-by-play announcer for Turner Sports’ broadcast of the NBA Western Conference Finals.
In 1996, he started working for Turner Sports to talk about NBA playoff games. In 1997, he started calling games for the whole season, and he still does that today.
Harlan has “verbally built scenes for viewers and listeners on sports’ biggest stages.” He has called 13 Super Bowl radio games and five Final Four games.
Also, Harlan was “thrilled” to get Stan Van Gundy, even though he and Reggie Miller worked well together and got along well.
The sports industry is where the Harlans make their money and build their careers
Kevin’s family is all about sports because his father was the director of sports information at Marquette University for many years. On the other hand, Olivia, his daughter, works as a sideline 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 of the British Basketball League (BBL) and the EuroCup.
She has also covered SEC and ACC football games for FOX Sports South and Raycom and reported from the sidelines during preseason games for the Packers TV Network. Olivia has also co-hosted a daily web show about the Green Bay Packers training camp.
Olivia Harlan and her father, Kevin, were the first father-daughter duo to call an NFL game together. Olivia was a sideline reporter, and Kevin was the announcer.
His father runs the Green Bay Packers as their CEO
Robert E. Harlan used to be the team’s chairman of the board and CEO. The Green Bay Packers are an American professional football team.
In 1971, Harlan started working as an assistant general manager for the Green Bay Packers.
In the 18 years that followed, he was given three promotions: 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 time 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 started 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 set up the Madeline and Robert Harlan Humanitarian Fund to help people with cancer who don’t have insurance. The idea for this fund came from the fact that Harlan was diagnosed with melanoma in 2003 and then treated for it.
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 at St. Mary’s to honor Madeline Harlan.
She also went to school to become a nurse, and during her clinical rotations at Mercy Hospital in Des Moines, Iowa, she worked with sisters who cared about patients just as much as she did.