KENNESAW — Mike Plant, president of the Atlanta Braves Development Company, has always had a competitive edge.
Whether he was competing in the Olympics or building The Battery Atlanta, he said his drive to prove others wrong has stuck with him.
“You have to be committed, you have to have conviction … Those are things I take back to my athletic career,” Plant said. “I love to compete and I love it when someone says you can’t do something.”
Plant shared some of the highlights from his sports career, as well as the future of The Battery, during a talk at the Kennesaw Business Association’s monthly luncheon this week. John Loud, president of Loud Security Systems, moderated the conversation.
“I cannot begin to tell you guys about the ripple effects for how all of our lives have benefitted from what Mike’s team and Mike’s leadership have done,” Loud said.
Olympic Background
Originally from Green Bay, Wisconsin, Plant said he never imagined himself becoming a professional speed skater. Growing up, he played classic American sports including baseball, football and basketball; but after his older brother Tom introduced him to speedskating at the age of 12, he decided to give it a go, even if he was considered “late” to the sport.
“It’s a very highly technical sport,” he said. “You see little 4- and 5-year-old kids that grow up in a mountain, they’re pretty good skiers … You go and try to do that at 13, 14, 20, when you’ve never done it before, it’s a lot harder than those 4- and 5-year-olds make it look.”
After an unsuccessful first competition, Plant said he was ready to give up, but thanks to some tough love from his father, he decided to stick with it.
“He said, ‘OK, I thought you had a little bit more in you than that,’” Plant said. “And boy that stung, and four years later I made my first junior world team … It helped launch my career. It was a hurtful statement from your dad, but it was very effective.”
Plant’s talents eventually earned him — as well as his brother Tom — a spot on the 1980 Olympic speedskating team competing in the Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, New York.
Plant did not medal in the games. The Olympic bling was reserved for his wife, swimmer Mary Meagher Plant, aka “Madam Butterfly,” who won three gold medals at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and a silver and bronze at the ‘88 games in Seoul, South Korea.
“I often say, between my wife and I, we have five gold medals: she has five and I have zero,” Plant joked.
Business Ventures
Although he didn’t win Olympic gold, Plant said being on the team helped launch his career in the business side of sports. Beginning in 1980, after unsuccessfully trying to stop the U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, Russia, he began serving on the U.S. Olympic Committee.
His other sports passions included cycling, where he rode professionally for a few years, and also served as associate executive director for USA Cycling. In an effort to expand the sport’s reach, Plant and fellow cyclist Greg LeMond, winner of the 1986, ‘89 and ‘90 Tour de France, founded their own company Medalist Sports to “put the Tour de France in America.”
For their first race, Plant was connected with none other than Donald Trump as a potential investor in Medalist Sports. Trump committed to funding the pair’s first race, even after Plant had to convince the future president they were not naming it the “Tour de Trump.”
“He launched the entire event,” Plant said. “If it would have been (another sponsor) there’s no chance that it would have had that type of notoriety. We had several million people on the race course every day, it was phenomenal.”
In 1995, after selling his company to Turner Broadcasting, he joined Turner Sports, where he eventually became executive vice president in 2002. There, he was in charge of the day-to-day operations of the division, which broadcasts approximately 1,200 hours of sports programming on various Turner networks.
In 2003, Phil Kent, the CEO of TBS, asked Plant to help turn around the Atlanta Braves, which had lost $100 million in the prior three years.
Atlanta Braves & The Battery
From the moment he joined the team, Plant said he spent eight years negotiating a memorandum of understanding between the team and the city of Atlanta and Fulton County’s recreation authority, which stated the team’s intention to “explore doing some type of lifestyle center, mix-use development” near Turner Field. After eight years, the team realized this type of development would not be feasible in the area.
“There was no reason for you to come downtown, other than to go to a Braves game,” Plant said. “It was not a great place to access. Parking was a challenge. Post-game, you would run to your car … and we were trying to put lipstick on that for a long time.
“For eight years, I sit here and I thank God I couldn’t get that thing signed.”
With the end of the team’s lease with Turner Field looming, as well as impending repair costs to Turner Field upwards of $150 million, Plant described his situation as being “down by six touchdowns at the half.”
But everything changed after a three-and-a-half-hour lunch meeting with Cobb Chairman Tim Lee, who recognized Plant’s vision for a new recreation area surrounding a new baseball stadium, and the potential impact it could have on Cobb County.
“I thought, ‘Here’s a government leader, a politician that understands how to run a business,’” he said. “He was willing to take a risk … and he also knew this was not about just building a new ballpark.”
The “game changer” with a new stadium Plant said, was not the stadium itself, it was the mix-use development surrounding the stadium, which would eventually morph into The Battery Atlanta.
In his role, Plant was in charge of the new development’s design, its financing, construction and leasing activities.
“I told everyone … we are going to do something no one’s ever done before,” he said. “We’re going to change the perception of what people in our business do and how we give back to these communities.”
The work was worth it in the end when The Battery and Truist Park officially opened in 2017.
Now up to 2 million square feet in size, the new park and the Battery bring between 9 and 10 million visitors per year, and The Battery’s various business leasing spaces are almost 100% occupied. Last year, Plant reported the Braves and The Battery contributing $40 million into the county’s general fund, up from the estimated $6.4 million when the deal was first struck between the team and the county.
“We understood what we were going to do … the vision was there, but we also had to have a public-private partnership,” Plant said.
The Battery: What’s next?
Coming off the heels of hosting the Major League Baseball All-Star Game and its subsequent festivities, Plant said the Cumberland area saw over 250,000 people over the five days of baseball activities.
Looking to the future, Plant hinted at the development of numerous properties throughout this next phase of The Battery, including two 20-story towers called The Henry, named after Atlanta Braves legend Henry “Hank” Aaron. One tower will house over 500 apartments while the second will serve multiple purposes as a hotel, apartment and condo complex.
Another development in the works is a pedestrian bridge crossing over Cobb Parkway, which will connect to The Battery. The project is in development between the team and the city of Smyrna, and is designed to help avoid “pedestrian and vehicle conflict” after Braves games.
Within The Battery, Plant said a deal is done with a “great” restaurant to set up shop on the bottom floor of Truist Securities’ headquarters near the stadium. Plant said The Battery will reveal the identity of that restaurant soon.
“We continue to look at the lineup we have and improve it, (and) make it better,” he said. “We’re constantly trying to improve and create more opportunities for our families and our guests to make sure it lives up to everyone’s expectations.”