Billy Payne recalls sketching out his plan to turn Atlanta's Olympic stadium into a ballpark for the Braves on a napkin at lunch one day in 1987. Payne was still three years from leading Atlanta's winning bid to hold the 1996 Summer Games.

"We had some unofficial architects at that point, and they said it couldn't be done," Payne said from Atlanta yesterday. "I took them at their word, so I started looking at more expensive solutions, so I told them to work harder." A couple of months later, he said, "They started saying, 'Maybe it can be done, if, if and if."'

A solution was found, and seven months after the demolition of the northern end of the stadium, the Braves started the 1997 baseball season in what had been an 85,000-seat Olympic stadium. They had been looking to move out of the city.

"We would have done O.K. in the suburbs, but it would have been different," said Stan Kasten, the former president of the Braves. "This kept us and enabled us to build the kind of stadium we wanted."