For years, Billy Payne and A.D. Frazier had a friendly rivalry going on: who could get into the offices the earliest at the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.
Payne, the visionary behind Atlanta’s Games, and Frazier, the banker, lawyer and executive in charge of making them happen, would get to work before sunup and stay long after dusk. In the evenings, they often gave speeches and took politicians and dignitaries to dinner or out for drinks building support for their effort to bootstrap a more than $1 billion global event. Then, they’d do it all again.
Payne said he wanted to show his chief operating officer he was as focused and hardworking as anyone in achieving his Olympic dream. Frazier was as competitive as any Olympian.
“It got so bad we had to call a truce, we knew we were killing ourselves doing that,” Payne said in an interview Tuesday with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “With a couple years left (before the Games) we said, ‘No one could get to the office before 6 o’clock.’ It was out of necessity, not out of competitiveness.”
Frazier, who built a legendary career mastering the art of getting things done, died Monday. He was 80 and had been in failing health.
Frazier was COO of ACOG, a former president of investment powerhouse Invesco and one of the great Atlanta civic leaders of his generation.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Payne was the idea-a-minute showman who conjured up a vision of Atlanta as an Olympic city. Andrew Young, the politician, civil rights leader and diplomat, helped Payne land and build support for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. Frazier, who joined the effort in 1991 after Atlanta had secured its place as host city, was Payne’s right hand, helping to deliver a world-class spectacle that also left the city with no debt.
The Games themselves were not funded by tax dollars (though security and other things outside arenas did have government support), with funding coming from sponsorships, TV deals and ticket sales.
Frazier oversaw construction and renovations of venues, negotiated with governments and neighborhood groups and essentially built an organization rivaling a Fortune 500 company out of thin air. He helped ACOG raise funds and sign contracts to stage the Olympics in a build-as-you-go model the International Olympic Committee no longer allows.
“He was not going to spend one more penny than we brought in. He was amazingly diligent,” Payne said. “As I look at all the talented people that I’ve known in my life, I have known very few who had the same combination of intellect and intensity.”
Payne dreamed up Centennial Olympic Park from his offices at what was then called the Inforum, turning what had been low-slung and abandoned buildings nearby into a gathering spot for the Games, inspired by what he saw in 1992 at Barcelona’s Placa d’Espanya. Frazier led negotiations on the intricate land deals with property owners and the agreement with the Georgia World Congress Center to be its owner after the Games, Payne said.
The park has since become the center of gravity for the city’s tourism industry, attracting the Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca-Cola, College Football Hall of Fame and National Center for Civil and Human Rights, renewing development interest in downtown that continues today.
The Olympic Stadium became Turner Field, for years the home of the Atlanta Braves. It is now on its third life as Center Parc Stadium, home of Georgia State University’s football team.
Reflecting in the AJC on the 25th anniversary of the Games in 2021, Frazier wrote “It’s been a generation and many of us were not even alive or were too young to remember when Atlanta hosted ‘the largest peacetime event in history,’ as Games organizer Billy Payne put it.”
“Well, friends, it was indeed a great time in Atlanta’s history. We were center stage for the world. We were fearless, brave, visionary, unified and committed to an idea ‘rooted in goodness,’” Frazier wrote. “We were demonstrating to the world the greatness of our Southern hospitality. We put aside those things that divided us and focused — if just for a moment — on those things that made us one. Together. We even overcame a terrorist bomber and reopened the park. I wept.”
Bert Roughton, a retired AJC senior managing editor who in the 1990s was the beat reporter assigned to cover the city’s Olympic preparations, said Frazier bridged the old Atlanta business world and post-Olympic order.
“A.D. is probably the single person most responsible for the success of the 1996 Olympics,” Roughton said. “He converted a dream into a reality.”
‘All Day Frazier’
Adolphus Drewry Frazier Jr., a full name he never liked, was born June 23, 1944, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. His parents were the late Adolphus Drewry Frazier Sr., a Baptist preacher, and Pauline (Smith) Frazier, a teacher.
A.D. Frazier earned an undergraduate degree in 1965 and a law degree in 1968, both from the University of North Carolina, working his way through college. He didn’t necessarily want to practice law but earned his degree and passed the bar at the urging of his grandfather.
Credit: AJC
Credit: AJC
Frazier played the cello and a college classmate of his once said he took a logic class for fun, a testament to his maturity.
In 1969, he joined Citizens & Southern National Bank in Atlanta as a management trainee. He took over the public relations department in 1973. C&S, a precursor to Bank of America, was a powerful institution in business and civic circles and Frazier ran community programs, including philanthropy.
Then, as now, Atlanta was steered by an emerging Black political leadership working with white business leaders.
Through his work at C&S, Frazier built deep bonds with both sides, particularly with the city’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson.
In 1977, he ran the inauguration of former President Jimmy Carter, an event that came in more than $1 million under budget. He also organized Carter’s White House. Frazier returned to C&S but later took a job in Chicago.
In early 1991, he was 46 and happy running a $10 billion portfolio of loans for First National Bank of Chicago when he was recruited to help run ACOG.
He told the AJC at the time that he dismissed the opportunity at first. He and his then-wife Jeanne lived comfortably in the Chicago suburbs with their two children, Jim and Carrie, then in high school. But ultimately, Frazier said he couldn’t pass it up, even though his $300,000 salary at ACOG was about a 50% pay cut.
“It’s daunting,” he said of the job then. “But I must also tell you it’s thrilling.”
His appointment was widely accepted by white and Black leaders. In Frazier, Payne found a match for his energy but also an accomplished executive to help steer him from trouble.
Marvin S. Arrington, now deceased, was then the City Council president and a longtime Frazier friend. He foresaw the early riser contests to come between Payne and Frazier.
“When Billy Payne gets to work at 4:30 in the morning, A.D. will have the coffee made, lights on and a few staff people working,” Arrington once said.
Young said within Olympic circles, he altered Frazier’s name, turning A.D. into “All Day.” “I called him All Day Frazier, because he was a workaholic,” Young said.
In a Tuesday interview, Young said his main concern going into the venture was money and the possibility of post-Olympics debt, a problem for many host cities before and after Atlanta.
“The reason we had such a success is because we always had money,” Young said. “We never had to worry about money and A.D. kept that in order.”
Charlie Battle, a lawyer at Miller & Martin who served as head of international relations for ACOG, said he thought Frazier was the only person who could have taken on the COO job.
“I think I was just always amazed at his work ethic and ability to assimilate facts and direct people towards the goal and focus on what was important,” he said.
Dick Yarborough was a lobbyist and executive in the telecommunications industry when he met Frazier in the 1970s. Their paths crossed again when Yarborough joined ACOG as head of government relations.
Yarborough helped negotiate with governments for security and other needs for the Games outside the venues.
“A.D.’s job was to see to it that things got done. My role in it was to make the environment as nonconfrontational as we could,” Yarborough said. “People used us for leverage. Every group you could think of wanted money from us.”
Though they sometimes clashed during the ACOG days, Yarborough said he loved Frazier and marveled at his ability to manage such an undertaking that had a tight deadline to meet.
“I don’t know anybody who could have dealt with the complexities that he did and the uncertainties that he did and just had the force to make it work,” he said.
Roughton, the retired AJC journalist, recalled an early conversation he had with Frazier at Manuel’s Tavern not long after he took the job as ACOG COO.
“He told me that he would always tell me — the reporter covering the preparations for the Olympics — the truth as far as he knew it so long as I would report it as he told me,” Roughton said. “We had tense moments but developed a bond of trust that lasted long after closing ceremonies.”
‘Cusp of greatness’
After the Games, Frazier took on the role of president of Atlanta-based Invesco. Later, he returned to Chicago, serving as chairman and CEO of the Chicago Stock Exchange before a stint as president of CVS Caremark. He also served as chairman and CEO of Danka Office Imaging.
He also led a state panel on taxation that helped rewrite much of Georgia’s tax code.
In his later career, Frazier was outspoken about the need for the Atlanta region to rally to confront major issues, including education, transportation, water and poverty.
In that 2021 op-ed, Frazier remarked the city was “filled with love, good spirits and pride,” during the Games, but lamented that those feelings had been lost over the years with the region mired in political tribalism and Balkanization.
“We were at the cusp of greatness 25 years ago and we can be there again,” he said.
In his later years, Frazier lived in Mineral Bluff in the North Georgia Mountains. He served as president of Georgia Oak Partners, a private equity firm. He also served on numerous boards, including for oil and gas giant Apache Corp. and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Frazier’s survivors include his third wife, Sha Frazier, as well as his adult children from his first marriage, Jim Frazier and Carrie Andersen, and four grandchildren.
His first marriage to Jeanne (Reinhardt) Frazier ended in divorce. Frazier was preceded in death by his second wife, Clair Frazier, who died in 2019.
Details about a memorial service for Frazier were not immediately available.
-Staff writer Ernie Suggs contributed to this report.
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