Maybe it was the time it used FedEx to send an important package to UPS, one of its $40 million sponsors.
Or when it kept a straight face as the guy from Mr. Turkey, another big-bucks benefactor, proclaimed that "the meat case will be an exciting place to shop."Or the time it linked Vanna White and Jesse Owens as Olympic icons. Or declared New Mexico a foreign country.
Whatever the pratfalls, it was clear that the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games was, indeed, a most exceptional bunch of Olympic organizers.
Through those mangled cases and many, many more, ACOG spent the better part of a decade and a record $1.7 billion bringing the Centennial Summer Games to America's South.
Now, almost a year after the Olympic flame arrived, ACOG prepares Monday to close its books and its doors.
A final, break-even budget will be presented, along with a last declaration that - despite a fatal bombing and breakdowns in key logistical areas - Atlanta had done what it sought to do: stage the biggest peacetime event in history and the greatest Olympics ever.
"I'm proud of the response we got from athletes and spectators," said Ginger Watkins, ACOG's secretary and a member of the small group that helped turn Billy Payne's impossible dream into a gold-plated reality. "We made the games accessible to athletes from all over the world. We touched more people than any Olympics before."
Critics will counter that it could have been so much better, especially for the host city.
"It was a squandered opportunity," said Dick Pound, an IOC vice president who, as the panel's chief liaison with ACOG, was frequently at odds with Payne, the organizing committee's founder and president.
You can argue the result until Dixie runs out of dew. But this is certain: ACOG did things unlike any Olympic host before - and almost certainly unlike any ever again.
"You learn," Pound said. The IOC has adopted post-Atlanta rules against most of the practices that got ACOG in trouble, and money was the root of most of those problems.
"They covered a massive operating budget and provided their city with $500 million in infrastructure. The problem was that the infrastructure was their profit," Pound said. "They spent their profit before they made the nut. And that produced a bit of austerity when it came to managing what they had produced."
Because he promised that no tax dollars would be spent to stage the games - including stadiums and athletes' dorms - Payne had to raise every cent ACOG needed from private sources, some decidedly un-Olympian.
There was Mr. Turkey, one of the official cold cuts brought out at a news-media spectacle that featured a 1,996-foot-long hot dog. Three trumpeters solemnly played the "Olympic Fanfare."
That came just weeks after ACOG announced that two staples of American fun, "Jeopardy!" and "Wheel of Fortune," were now the official game shows of the Olympics.
And that was too much for the IOC. Chafing under the tight budgeting and growing commercialization of the Atlanta Games, the IOC privately but firmly told ACOG it could buy all the vowels it wanted but had to find another label for the game-show connection.
"It made legitimate sponsorship titles a farce," said one official familiar with the IOC's position. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said the IOC flatly refused to consider one other sponsor category proposed by ACOG. "Just say it was sufficiently bad to be rejected," he said.
Even approved sponsors encountered problems.
When Olympic ticket brochures were printed, ACOG wanted to get them quickly to its most important clients. That included UPS, a member of the IOC's elite TOP group of exclusive, worldwide, $40 million sponsors. So ACOG shipped one right over - via FedEx, UPS' archrival.
It wasn't just sponsorships that ACOG sold in record numbers. An estimated 5.5 million fans bought 11 million tickets, both Olympic records - although not without some drawbacks.
ACOG was sued by some buyers who felt ripped off by season-ticket packages that cost more than individual tickets to all events. And the phone-sale campaign produced perhaps the most striking example of a small-town aura Olympic Atlanta was never quite able to shake.
Wade Miller, a volleyball fan from New Mexico, was told by an ACOG ticket-seller that she couldn't sell him seats because he lived in a foreign country.
"I told her I was calling from New Mexico and emphasized the New," the Santa Fe resident said. "She told me, `Sir, New Mexico, old Mexico, it doesn't matter. I understand it's a territory, but you still have to go through your nation's Olympic committee.' "
Pound said that lack of international connection kept Atlanta's efforts from reaching the heights they promised.
"It had a unique opportunity to demonstrate that its formula worked and it was a world-class city, and it failed to do it," he said. "It never showed itself as anything more than a regional city, provincial."
Pound had a unique look at one part of the Olympic city - its police and courts. His wife was fined $2,000 for disorderly conduct and disobeying an officer after being stopped for jaywalking during the games.
ACOG's greatest moment perhaps came when Muhammad Ali lighted the Olympic flame above the main stadium. Its lowest came a week later, when a pipe bomb killed one person and injured hundreds more crowded into Centennial Olympic Park.
In between, there were problems with transportation and technology, two supposed strongpoints of the Atlanta package, and international criticism of the bazaar of beer stands and T-shirt stalls the city allowed to envelop the sports venues.
"ACOG had it in for Atlanta's public parties, and vice versa," Pound said. "Some of the things the city did was unconscionable, especially since it was being paid a major favor by the organizing committee."
So Payne and his colleagues never got to hear the words they craved most. IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch usually ends the Olympics by declaring that edition the greatest ever, but he told Atlanta merely that its had been "indeed, most exceptional."
Now, they're mostly invisible.
The 80,000-seat stadium has been reduced to a 50,000-seat baseball field. The cauldron Ali set roaring to life is a charred orphan looking for a home.
"By and large, it's as if they (the games) never occurred," Pound said. "That's the real tragedy for the city of Atlanta."
Payne is a vice president of NationsBank, and ACOG - which at one point had 129,000 employees, volunteers and contract workers - is down to 25 staffers and dropping fast.
"We're packing boxes and detailing what goes where," Watkins said. "There's a lot of moving and sorting."
And this original ACOGer said she's "absolutely delighted" that the focus of her life for the past 10 years is about to fade away.
"I feel good about the experience," Watkins said, "but I wouldn't want to do it again."