Atlanta is grieving this week in a way it rarely has before.
Within days of each other, the city lost two of the most consequential figures in its history — Ted Turner, the media mogul who bought the Atlanta Braves and built a global empire from the banks of the Chattahoochee, and Bobby Cox, the Hall of Fame manager who turned that franchise into a dynasty. Together, they gave Atlanta something it had never had and may never have again. Their deaths, arriving almost simultaneously, mark the closing of a chapter that the city will spend years trying to process.
Turner died at 87. Cox died Saturday at his home in Marietta. He was 84.
What They Built Together
The story of the Braves’ 1990s dynasty cannot be told without both men.
Turner purchased the Braves in 1976 when the franchise was hemorrhaging money and drawing almost no one to Fulton County Stadium. He was loud, unconventional, and absolutely committed to keeping baseball in Atlanta. He absorbed losses for years. He once managed the team himself for a single game. He sat with the fans instead of retreating to a luxury box. He was, by any measure, the most enthusiastic booster the city had ever seen.
Cox, meanwhile, was building the machine that would make those investments pay off. Between his two managerial stints in Atlanta, Cox served as the team’s general manager from 1986 to 1990, assembling the core of what would become one of the most dominant rosters in baseball history — third baseman Chipper Jones and a pitching rotation built around Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz.
When Cox returned to the dugout in 1990, the pieces were in place. What followed was something baseball had never seen before and has not seen since. Fourteen consecutive division titles. Five National League pennants. A World Series championship in 1995.
Turner was in the stands for all of it, his fist pumping, sitting next to his then-wife Jane Fonda. Cox was in the dugout, arguing calls, protecting his players, and accumulating a major league record 162 career ejections — each one a testament to how fiercely he fought for the men who played for him.
The End of Something Irreplaceable
Atlanta has had great figures before, and it will have them again. But the combination of what Turner and Cox represented — the owner who refused to let the city fail and the manager who refused to let the team lose — was singular. It was a partnership that neither man could have fully achieved without the other, and it produced something that defined Atlanta for a generation.
Turner spent his final years largely out of the public eye, having disclosed in 2018 that he was living with Lewy body dementia. Cox had been in declining health since suffering a major stroke in April 2019, which left him with partial paralysis and significant difficulty speaking.
This week, Atlanta lost both the man who built the stage and the man who filled it. What they gave this city — the wins, the identity, the belief that Atlanta belonged among the great sports cities in America — will not be forgotten.