Atlanta Can’t Just ‘Put This Behind Them’

I wanted to revive my Olympic memories, to see if I could get that old feeling back, that blanket of goose bumps that says the world of sports is a Bud Greenspan film.

So I took a walk in the park. But it sure wasn’t.

It had been a year and a half since I’d set foot in Olympic Centennial Park, a year and a half since that night that rocked our spirits and bombed our naivete. It was a night of bloody faces and screaming sirens and journalistic adrenaline overdose, a night when games became gruesome and sport became scarred.

It was the night that Alice S. Hawthorne, a 44-year-old receptionist for a cable company in Albany, Ga., took the full brunt of shrapnel from a pipe bomb planted nearby and lost her life. Around her, more than 100 others were cut and slashed, leaving little pools of blood behind. No more than 50 feet away, Janet Evans, darling of Olympic swimming, was being interviewed on a stage behind a huge plate-glass window. Had the bomb been 10 feet left or right, or had more of it detonated, there is no telling what might have happened to that window and the international figure who stood behind it.

I took my walk on a quiet Sunday night in January. Atlanta was a city long freed of the hot dog stands and carnival atmosphere that its downtown had become in that summer of 1996. Now, it hustled and bustled to the sounds and pace of the convention business, including a gathering of NCAA officials that had brought me back here.

But few found their way this night to Olympic Centennial Park, located only a few blocks from the main hotels and the famous shops and night life of the Atlanta Underground. It was quiet, almost eerie.

I remembered my first look at the place. It was from the balcony of the office of Billy Payne, the head of the group that won the Games for Atlanta, beating out a shocked Athens, and then organized them proudly for the 100th anniversary edition. Payne had stood on that same balcony a year or so before that and had a Martin Luther King-like dream. In the collection of rubble and rotting buildings below, Payne saw a park that would be carved out of the land and into the hearts of the people of Atlanta and the world. It would be the aorta of a throbbing event, the hub of his Olympic wheel.

And so it became. I remembered him saying that day, to his gathered group of journalists, “The Games are for most of the people; the park is for all of the people.”

It was more eloquent than he meant it to be, I’m sure. He was telling us that admission to the park would be free.

Olympic Centennial Park was to be the lasting symbol of his Games, the stamp on the minds of people worldwide that Barcelona had achieved with Plaza de Espana and Los Angeles had with its Coliseum peristyle end.

Then Alice Hawthorne’s life was lost, at 1:25 a.m. July 27, 1996, as music from a Los Angeles rock band pierced the warm summer air and thousands of people walked and talked and sang and danced nearby.

Suddenly, the lasting symbol that Billy Payne had wished for his park would be everlasting. It would be a symbol that Payne and Atlanta wanted none of.

I remember so vividly the rush to get the Games back to being games. I remember the lip service paid the disaster and the name and memory of Alice Hawthorne, and the almost frantic rush to do and say what so many pro athletes do these days shortly after they have been picked up on drunk-driving charges after running over some little old lady in their brand new $75,000 Porsches. Payne and Atlanta wanted to “put this behind them.”

I remember the reopening of the park later in the Games, and the “moment of silence” for Hawthorne and the injured. The Times’ resident wit, Mike Downey, watched it with me and dubbed it the “nanosecond of silence.”

So here I was, a year and a half later, looking for something, drawn back here for some reason, but not sure exactly what.

Perhaps it was curiosity. Or, maybe with the Winter Games in Nagano only a few weeks away, it was time to rekindle some Olympic spirit, time to get that old Dan-Jansen- skates-around-the- rink-with-his- daughter-in-his-arms feeling again.

Whatever it was, I walked and walked in an attempt to find it. I walked past the seven pillars, past the water fountains of the Olympic rings that still come alive every half hour or so with water synchronized to Olympic songs. To my left was the CNN Center, looming like some sort of watch tower over the park. To my right the statue of Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics.

Then I knew why I was there. I was looking for the spot where Alice Hawthorne died, looking not out of some ghoulish pursuit but out of a desire to see what sort of monument to her memory Atlanta had left.

What I found was lots of mud and construction piles, an area surrounded by plastic fence that was easy to step over for a closer look. I found a bricked-off area, partially finished, with the following words carved in the brickwork: “Quilt of Remembrance.”

I was in the park for about an hour, and was bothered the whole time. It took a week or so to figure out why.

Eventually, I made some calls and got a woman named Kellie Holbrook of the Georgia World Congress Center, which is in charge of the park, to tell me why, a year and a half later, there are still mounds of mud and construction piles around the site where Alice Hawthorne died. She said that the Quilt of Remembrance that I had seen was to be one of five symbolic quilts spread out in 60-by-60 foot plots along that northeast area of the park. She said the others would be a Quilt of Dreams, in memory of Payne and the organizers; a Greek Tribute to the history of the Olympics, a tribute to the athletes of the world and a tribute to the participating nations in Atlanta, the best attended Games of all time.

She said that plans were to have a mosaic of colors in the Quilt of Remembrance, with a single light in the center of the quilt that would stand for Hawthorne. She said that all the quilts would be finished in March and that a special dedication would take place the weekend of March 28.

I told her that was nice, and that I liked the idea of the single light as a commemorative.

I didn’t tell her I was bothered that it still wasn’t done, that somebody should have thought about having it done and dedicated by the time of the Nagano Olympics, thereby achieving some degree of symbolic closure.

I realized that it was probably just me, that I was being too fastidious or was getting caught up too much in Olympic symbolism and emotion, that I was still more affected than I thought by what I had seen and experienced that night.

The Quilt of Remembrance, with the light in the middle, will be nice. It’s a good plan, a good idea.

And, as I keep trying to convince myself, it’s also better late than never.