Billy Payne had the idea on a Sunday afternoon in 1987, right after finishing a fundraising campaign for a Dunwoody church, and he has never fully explained it since. What followed was a real estate attorney recruiting Mayor Andrew Young and a circle of friends who became the Atlanta Nine, then beating Athens, Belgrade, Birmingham, Melbourne and Toronto for the Centennial Games. "The Atlanta press called us the 'Crazy Atlanta Nine,'" Horace Sibley told Atlanta Magazine, "because victory was thought to be so improbable."
Young, now 94, did the arithmetic that made it possible. Looking at the list of 85 IOC members, he counted how many had consulates in Atlanta and how many came from African countries he had visited as a congressman and UN ambassador, and figured the city could get 55 votes. It got 51, which was enough. His speech reopening Centennial Olympic Park after the 1996 bombing remains the defining civic text of that summer. He now runs the Andrew J. Young Foundation and an aquaponics farm in Southwest Atlanta that grows food for the food insecure.
Payne, 78, slept for days after the Closing Ceremony, then resurfaced in 2006 as chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, where he served 11 years and admitted the club's first female members. He now works in real estate with his son and recently advised the Los Angeles 2028 committee. His counsel to them, delivered with a laugh: just chill out.
The rest of the group scattered into the institutions that run this city. Charlie Battle, the bid's director of international relations, worked 70 countries, later led Central Atlanta Progress, and consulted on bids from Beijing to Istanbul. Shirley Franklin, then a senior policy adviser, became Atlanta's first female mayor. Linda Stephenson oversaw 50,000 volunteers and the Cultural Olympiad, then moved the Games memorabilia to the Atlanta History Center, where it is still on display. Ginger Watkins ran ceremonies, the look of the Games and the torch relay, then edited the three-volume official report. Peter Candler, now 85, and Cindy Fowler, 83, worked the lobbying and hospitality side that turned IOC members into friends.
The visual and verbal identity came from two men who kept working long after. Brad Copeland drew the circle of five A's, then the Quilt of Leaves theme that married Atlanta's city-in-a-forest reputation to Southern quilting, and went on to advise the IOC on the look of every Games from Nagano 1998 through PyeongChang 2018. George Hirthler wrote the bid, later wrote Beijing's "One World, One Dream," pushed for the Pierre de Coubertin statue that stands in Centennial Olympic Park, and won a 2025 Emmy for The Games in Black & White, about Payne and Young's friendship. Press chief Bob Brennan, now 97, earned an English degree from Georgia State at 85.
Three of the Nine are gone: Bobby Rearden in 2015, Charlie Shaffer in 2021, Tim Christian in 2024. What they left is not abstract from where we sit. Centennial Olympic Park, the Coubertin statue, the History Center's exhibit, the international-city status that a Super Bowl and a World Cup have both since traded on. With Super Bowl LXII arriving in 2028, it is worth remembering that downtown has something to show the world at all because a group of people with no business trying decided to try anyway.
Original reporting: Atlanta Magazine (July 24, 2026)
Photo: Ke4roh (cropped), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)