Atlanta sports in the ’90s thrived well beyond the Olympics

With a nationally televised MLB heavyweight, three new venues, three new teams, and two Big Game hosting bids, ‘Loserville’ had a decade-long reprieve.

Five notable ’90s upstarts on the Atlanta sports scene vanished before the 2010s were over. Three have a replacement of equal purpose while the others still leave a pothole of melted ice.

Separate from all of that, but presenting its own then-and-now contrast, is the local MLB franchise and its one-time twofold dominance. Atlanta’s longest-tenured and historically most influential team, the Braves essentially remain big-league baseball’s sole Southeastern entity. Their closest competitors in either direction are in the Beltway or Florida.

But the present is nothing like when they built a bandwagon by renewing a perpetual playoff passport on national TV virtually every night. Results-wise, owner Ted Turner’s power peaked, and the dividends were no more evident than they were 25 years ago.

In the summer of 1996, the Braves were the defending World Series champions. Their title — built around the three-headed franchise face of elite pitchers Tom Glavine, Greg Maddox, and John Smoltz — had redeemed losses in ’91 and ’92. It also drew extra attention to the home of that year’s Olympics, where one new structure would be the team’s new yard the next spring.

Turner Field started as Centennial Olympic Stadium, the Games’ track-and-field and ceremony venue. With its 1993 groundbreaking, it bolstered the physical evidence already manifested by the Georgia Dome to signal an all-at-once turnaround for a long-suffering market.

Monday’s silver anniversary of the Atlanta Olympics opening ceremony coincides with the wait for a new book, Clayton Trutor’s Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta – and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports. Trutor’s tome focuses on how the Southeast’s definitive metropolis, as a big-league sports town, went from zero to four in seven years, culminating in 1972.

Three years after the last team took root, the name Loserville came from a special 1975 series in the Atlanta Constitution. The collective honeymoon was over, and poor results on the scoreboard comprised one factor, but not the sole reason for substandard fanfare.

In the decade and a half between the label’s origin and the advent of the ’90s, Turner’s boys of summer tried to pass themselves off as “America’s Team” through a superstation experiment. The Turner Broadcasting System was, obviously, his network and the Braves were his team, so he exercised his freedom for all serviced subscribers to see.

But with only fleeting exceptions, ongoing struggles on the field inhibited that push for national fanfare. Mike Downey, a Los Angeles Times columnist and Georgia transplant, had one of the last laughs at Loserville when the ’90s were barely taking shape. Two weeks into the 1990 season, he ridiculed the preferential TV treatment Turner’s team got through its connections.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if the Braves were any good,” Downey noted during a seventh straight losing season. Up to that time, the team had only mustered three winning campaigns and one playoff appearance (1982) in the TBS era.

Finding fertile turf

Amid the locale’s visible baseball blunders, the turn of the decade’s highlight was the wee stages of the Georgia Dome’s construction. Commenced with a November 1989 groundbreaking, the project ended in 1992, and football’s Falcons moved in that autumn, leaving the Braves as the sole tenant at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

The franchise that could only call itself “America’s Team” on the basis of (potential) living-room exposure was stuck in its past. But everywhere else on the scene, new facilities and their confirmed tenants were presaging prosperity.

Six months into the Georgia Dome’s gestation, then again when two weeks remained in another slipshod summer, Atlanta sports in general drew more favorable attention. On May 23, 1990, the NFL awarded Super Bowl XXVIII to the Falcons’ new nest, which would cap its sophomore season by the time of those playoffs in the winter of 1994.

Then in a genuine come-from-behind upset, Atlanta was awarded the 1996 Summer Olympics on September 18, 1990. It beat out Athens, Belgrade, Manchester, Melbourne, and Toronto (whose Blue Jays would defeat the Braves in the first binational World Series two years later).

Athens was the initial frontrunner, leading second-place Atlanta after the first and second of five rounds of votes. But Atlanta tied the third inning, gained ground in the fourth, and then surged to seize the upper hand in the final.

The city’s fortunes in this derby thus nearly foreshadowed its ballclub’s results over the five subsequent seasons. After one more sixth-place finish following Downey’s dis, the Braves flip-flopped their win-loss bushels and nabbed three straight National League West tickets to the playoffs. Following realignment, they topped the NL East in every remaining completed season of the ’90s plus the first six of the aughts.

Those first two postseason berths upgraded to NL pennants with back-to-back Game 7 triumphs. Amid the first of those runs, the Deseret News published this headline: “ATLANTA SHEDDING ITS ‘LOSERVILLE’ IMAGE.” The October 7, 1991, piece noted the dynamic diamond resurgence, along with the upcoming Super Bowl and Olympic hosting stints.

The latter clincher had just witnessed a one-year anniversary bash. The former privilege would be realized in person on January 30, 1994. That night another America’s Team, the Dallas Cowboys, left the Georgia Dome with a repeat Lombardi Trophy while the Buffalo Bills left with their fourth straight runner-up sticker.

A peachy period for pucks

After Super Bowl XXVII, Atlanta sports venues were not done hosting trophy presentations and champagne showers that year. The 1995 World Series was the city’s first, and still only, major sports triumph for a local team. But 16 months prior, fans got the illusion of another through the International Hockey League.

While the largely independent IHL was technically part of its sport’s answer to Triple-A baseball, it went on a renegade run that caught fire in the ’90s. Any major-league market or building that lacked an NHL team was fair game for a new IHL franchise. Ambitious regional and national TV contracts came about, as did trading cards and other merchandise of maximum professionalism.

The intention was to create a big-league product for that celebrated minor-league price and a family-friendly experience that deftly balanced both levels. And in 1992, Atlanta’s Omni got its shot 12 years after losing the NHL’s Flames to Calgary.

The Atlanta Knights were one of the IHL’s few affiliated teams, and got an instant storyline from their connections. They launched concomitantly with their parent club, the Tampa Bay Lightning, who assigned them goaltender Manon Rheaume out of training camp. After becoming the first woman to play an NHL preseason game, Rheaume duplicated her milestone in high-end minor-league regular-season action.

Then with John Paris Jr., the first Black head coach in league history, the Knights broke another sheet of ice. With Paris’ guidance, they cruised to the 1994 Turner Cup (whose namesake, Joe Turner, was of no relation to Ted) and attracted a league-record audience of 14,107 to the clinching game.

Incidentally, that banner year filled a void in the Braves’ divisional dynasty, as the 1994 MLB players’ strike aborted any would-be playoff runs. But once order was restored on the diamond, the volatile nature of minor-league puck caught up with this “non-traditional” market.

By the time Hotlanta’s Olympic hype was peaking amid the Braves’ push for a World Series repeat, the Knights had followed the Flames to Canada, becoming the Quebec Rafales. That said, one more year elapsed before the market had assurance it could soon restore its four-team status.

The NHL approved four expansion candidates on June 25, 1997 — 20 days after the Omni’s replacement, Philips Arena, broke ground — with the upstarts to gradually inaugurate over the next three years. Atlanta set up its turn for the fall of 1999, when Philips was ready to open.

Local pride, along with a no-nonsense bird motif to fly with the Falcons and Hawks, directed the new team’s christening as the Atlanta Thrashers after Georgia’s state bird.

Ins and outs

Until the Thrashers fulfilled their last formality, another hockey hiatus took hold for three years. But sport-hungry Georgians who didn’t mind another helping of hoops during the winter could add the American Basketball League’s Glory to the Hawks for two of those years.

Launched in the fall of 1996, ahead of the more publicity-nourished WNBA the next summer, the ABL constituted one half of the first coexisting pair of professional women’s basketball circuits. It fizzled after two-plus years, and the Glory folded prior to that truncated third and final campaign in 1998-99.

But as the Knights did the Thrashers, the Glory ultimately preceded the WNBA’s Dream, whose inauguration remains one of this century’s few sterling highlights in Atlanta sports.

As for the final year of the ’90s, whether it was a first-time-ever or first-time-in-a-longtime deal, or a routine deep run, Georgians just needed to be happy to have their men’s team there. The Falcons put in their first Super Bowl appearance — one year before Atlanta was set to host another Big Game itself — only to lose to the incumbent Denver Broncos on January 31.

The Hawks never advanced beyond the second round of the NBA playoffs in the ’90s, but at the end of the decade, they had the league’s most celebrated defensive player in Dikembe Mutombo. He barely missed three-peating the award for that category in 1998-99, finishing second on the ballot.

Then the Thrashers’ first month of play coincided with the Braves’ fifth World Series appearance in five years. As in ’96, they bowed to the genuinely dynastic New York Yankees, another repeat champion.

But five days after that first Braves-Yanks series, Atlanta added to its hosting dynasty. On October 31, 1996, 88 days after the Olympics closing ceremonies and 57 days after the Paralympics wrapped up, the Georgia Dome received Super Bowl XXXIV, to be played January 30, 2000.

According to a 2019 Sports Illustrated retrospective, the NFL owners’ decision to award Atlanta its second Big Game in seven years was a dying gift for Rankin Smith Sr. The original Falcons owner succumbed to heart failure in October 1997, living long enough to at least see the successful bid.

Regardless, after the first month of Y2K, the city did not host another Super Bowl until 2019. Atlanta did have the 2002 and 2007 NCAA Men’s Final Four, but no other ties to championship events in the aughts. No local team came within tasting distance of a title until the Dream lost the 2010 WNBA Final in a sweep by the Seattle Storm.

In between, the Thrashers failed to win a single postseason series (losing their only one to the New York Rangers in a sweep) or sustain sufficient fanfare. Like the Flames and the Knights before them, they sought thicker ice in the Great White North, becoming the Winnipeg Jets in 2011.

State Farm (nee Philips) Arena still caters to hoops heads through the Hawks, and the Glory gap has long been filled by the Dream in suburban College Park. But the Falcons sought fresh digs again in the 2010s, giving rise to Mercedes-Benz Stadium (site of that 2019 Super Bowl). Meanwhile Turner Field’s relatively short lifespan ended in the 2017-18 offseason, and baseball has technically left Atlanta proper.

The Braves built SunTrust Park in suburban Cumberland, and moved in one decade after shedding any spin on an “America’s Team” label, as TBS upgraded its baseball coverage to the full scope of the majors in 2008.

That move was the last mark of a decade devoid of much national spotlight — via championships won, played in, or hosted; teams or venues christened; or representatives earning attention — after such a booming ’90s. Even if Loserville wasn’t all the way back, the height of the reprieve was over.