Despite many promises to myself, my thoughts drift again to 1996.
Maybe it’s the impending end of an era: In a few months the Braves will vacate the stadium built for the Olympics, permanently altering an important emotional link to that amazing time.
Or maybe it was hearing about the final harvest for the giant glowing peach that has hovered over the Downtown Connector for 22 years – a reminder of the “clutter” Olympics. But, we’ll come back to that.
To be sure, the stadium is likely to have a third life after Georgia State University refashions it — maybe restoring it as a place for amateur athletes — but it will move another generation from its origins. Olympic stadiums tend to be the most important relic of a city’s Olympic experience. For all that the 1936 Games meant to the Nazi propaganda machine, when I walked the track of the old stadium years ago I could hear only the cheers for Jesse Owens.
For all that has happened to cheapen the Olympic ideal, it is hard not to choke up a little sitting in the marble stands of the stadium in Athens that hosted the first Modern Olympics in 1896. In those days, the Games were intended at least in part to revive the ancient Olympic custom of briefly declaring world peace so young people could stop killing each other for a couple of weeks.
In Atlanta, I remember sitting in the Olympic Stadium watching chrome pickups, strange silhouettes, thundering drums and the march of the world’s athletes for the opening ceremony. We all stopped breathing as a trembling Muhammad Ali labored to light the gadget that hoisted the Olympic flame to the cauldron.
A few nights later I sat with my family in the stands taking in the brightly lit multi-ring circus that is the track-and-field competitions. I suspect the other 85,000 people in the stadium that night also will forever remember the experience.
On sunny spring days, I am transported 20 years back to my first walk on the floor of the just-finished Olympic Stadium. The oval structure was a grand sight. You could easily make out the horseshoe shape of baseball stands at one end. A station for Olympic photographers occupied the space that would later become home plate.
As the reporter who for six years chronicled the odd process that gave us the Atlanta Games, the track under my feet was my first tangible experience of 1996 Games. I admit it, I get sappy over the place.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t count myself among those who have a strong opinion about the Braves crossing the Chattahoochee to their new home in Cobb County. Frankly, who cares?
Despite giving the impression of being something else, a professional baseball team is a business, and the team made a calculated business decision to move its product closer to its core market. I get that. I also accept that the city leaders more or less shrugged their shoulders when the Braves threatened to quit Atlanta. In the grand scheme, it really doesn’t much matter. Lifting the weight of a major league baseball field from the neighborhoods around Turner Field probably will be a good thing. Long-suffering fans will learn to endure a different sort of traffic nightmare.
But none of this means that the stadium is without meaning, even in a place that has been built on the principle of “past, what past?”
On the other hand, it is also completely possible that the memories were triggered by the news last week about the impending end of the kinda kitschy Olympic peach that has loomed atop the IBEW building across the Downtown Connector from the stadium. It was erected by developer and Georgia Tech football legend Taz Anderson in early 1994 as his way to celebrate the Games. He was a visionary of sorts who saw the 25-foot metal orb as Atlanta’s answer to Marietta’s Big Chicken. Fortunately, we will still be able to celebrate the twin peach that remains by the connector in Midtown.
(A slight diversion: At a 1992 press conference in Barcelona, then-Mayor Maynard Jackson was asked what great sights Atlanta had to compare with the grandeur of Barcelona, including Gaudi’s magnificent cathedral the Sagrada Familia. His response: “We may not have the Sagrada Familia, but we do have the Big Chicken and the Cyclorama.”)
For Olympic organizers, the peach was not only a tacky eyesore, it made for an unpleasant reminder of the Atlanta outside their control, which became a chaotic riot of unbridled American capitalism.
In the official venues, everything from the color schemes to the placement of signage was tastefully controlled. Outside, the city was a roaring bazaar, hawking T-shirts, coffee mugs, plastic torches just about anything you could imprint with “Atlanta” or “1996.”
The “clutter,“ as it was described by a horrified member of the International Olympic Committee, was so offensive to the sophisticated sensibilities of the Olympic family that it vowed to never again allow a host city to permit its entrepreneurs to run amok. It also grated on the Olympic sponsors who had paid millions to license official merchandise.
Yet, unlike the sanitized feel of the venues, the streets had a kind of gritty, authentic feel, like some massive street carnival that at least for a few weeks brought some flesh and blood to our then-sad city center. Even if it was tacky, it was kinda fun.
So, the most important symbols of both the our tackiness and grandeur will pass into some other existence this year.
This is odd perfection, as it will be forever impossible to separate the tackiness from the grandeur of the Atlanta Olympics.
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