On the Execution of a Killer

Video via the Atlanta Falcons

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© Tim Peeler, 2017

The Georgia Dome killed the ACC tournament, and early Monday, just like with Charles Manson, justice finally was served for its crimes against humanity.

The dome didn't send cult family members out into the suburbs to kill the best part of the basketball season—it just took the shine off an event whose tickets were once considered the hardest to obtain in all of sports, even more difficult than notoriously exclusive Masters.

In this case, judgment was swift. It took only 15 seconds for most of the building—which opened at a cost of $214 million in 1992—to crumble into dust. Manson spent 40 some years on and off California’s death row before he died early Monday, old and unimportant, at the age of 83.

The Georgia Dome was only 25.

It’s not like I have no fond memories at all of the building. On Jan. 1, 1995, NC State beat Mississippi State, 28-24, in the second Peach Bowl ever played indoors. I covered a couple of entertaining Atlanta Falcons games there, when quarterback Chris Miller was trying not to shoot himself in the foot running Jerry Glanville’s “Red Gun Offense.”

At the 1996 Centennial Olympics, I begrudgingly covered a couple of Dream Team games at the dome, which as divided down the middle, with one half hosting basketball games and the other half hosting gymnastics and team handball competition.

One day, after a difficult morning of covering beach volleyball (don’t judge me, I was on assignment), I wandered into the Georgia Dome to see if the U.S. women’s gymnastics team could win its first ever team gold medal. I took the first open seat on press row and was annoyed when a thumb-like member of the media immediately crawled over the top of me to take the only other empty seat.

When Dominique Moceanu fell twice on the vault and Kerri Strug twisted her ankle on her first attempt, those hopes were all but ended. With coach Bela Karolyi screaming "You can do it, you can do it," Strug took off down the runway for her second attempt, vaulted and landed on one foot before collapsing in pain. But she stuck the landing, and the U.S. beat the Russians in the team competition for the first time ever.

The energetic media member beside me jumped up and gave me an unexpected hug in the excitement of the moment, and that's when I realized it was former gold medalist and off-duty television analyst Mary Lou Retton. She rushed down the stands, screamed and hugged Nadia Comaneci and Bart Connor, who were sitting just in front of us. I interviewed all three about this historic moment in U.S. gymnastics history for my story in the Durham Herald-Sun.

The coolest thing was seeing Karolyi carry Strug to the podium for the gold medal ceremony and then into the media room for interviews. It was the defining moment of the Centennial Olympic Games, along with Michael Johnson's unprecedented double gold medal performance in track and field.

In 2001, I went back to Atlanta and the dome to see how the facilities were going to host an event that, to me, was even bigger than the Olympics: the Atlantic Coast Conference men’s basketball tournament.

For decades, there had been no public sale of tickets to the tournament, which was born and raised in Reynolds Coliseum and had been played in larger arenas like the Charlotte Coliseum, the Greensboro Coliseum, the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, and The Omni in Atlanta during the league’s first 50 years. NC State won tournament titles in each of those buildings.

The league was convinced that if it occasionally opened the doors to the 71,228-seat Georgia Dome, or some other extra-large football facility, more fans would clamor to donate money to their schools for the opportunity to buy the impossible-to-get tickets. So more than 180,000 people watched the five sessions of the tournament, an average of 36,505 per session.

The championship game between Duke and North Carolina—won by the Blue Devils on their way to the 2001 NCAA title—drew 40,083 spectators, at the time the largest crowd to ever see a conference tournament game. The ticket market, however, was depressed. Before the tournament even started, fans from Virginia and Maryland were selling entire tournament books for less than face value. Tickets for the upper deck, an elevated football field away from the court, sold for $18.

Scalpers were selling center court tickets for the Blue Devil-Tar Heel final for less than $75 each.

The market never really recovered, especially following the economic downturn of 2008. Even in 2003, when the league celebrated its 50^th anniversary at the Greensboro Coliseum, tickets were on public sale, but they were easily and cheaply available in the parking lot before every session.

When the ACC tournament returned to Atlanta in 2009, it was becoming clear that the tournament, now increased to six total sessions because of league expansion, was not the same spectacle as it was before. More than 10,000 fewer spectators attended each session. For the first time since 1966—the last time the tournament was played in Reynolds Coliseum—advanced tickets to the tournament were sold directly to public, not just to donors of the individual schools.

As the tournament wandered from Greensboro to Charlotte to Atlanta to Tampa to Washington, average attendance hovered between 20,000 and 22,000. The availability tickets, once harder to get than perfect score on the SAT, has been plentiful for all who want to attend, which is not exactly a bad thing for fans of college basketball.

The league no longer relies on ticket sales as a primary revenue stream, and schools have used the model of permanent seat licenses in both football and basketball arenas to generate guaranteed revenue to go along with ever growing barrels of cash from television networks for broadcast rights.

I once had a streak of covering 25 consecutive ACC championships and it was always the highlight of my annual calendar, a place where we all gathered for three intense days of basketball. Now, the tournament is played over five days, most recently in Brooklyn, a place so far away a friend who had covered the event for 49 consecutive years was unable to attend. I have no idea if or when I’ll go to another.

It’s not the same anymore, and that’s fine. The league, now with 15 teams and a convoluted bracket that includes back-to-back days with four games each, seems to be doing OK. Things change.

But in its heyday, going to the ACC tournament was better than the Super Bowl, the Final Four or the Olympics, when just being in the building was almost as big of an accomplishment as seeing your favorite team win.

In the dust of the dome’s death, it’s never been clearer that those days aren’t coming back.