Mega Millions win goes coast to coast: Atlanta to San Jose

When it comes to televised sports, executives root for teams in large markets from opposite coasts to build excitement and grow the audience. Mega Millions, a different kind of sport, scored the same kind of blanket media coverage with its announced winners in Atlanta and California for the near-record $636-million jackpot.

The odds of winning lotteries are impossibly high -- about 1 in 259 million for the jackpot in Mega Millions. It is almost more likely that anything else in human experience will happen than winning. The odds are better that you will be hit by a meteorite or lightning, than you will win the big one in the lottery.

Yet on Wednesday morning, in office pools across the nation, workers took time from their Christmas parties to look at their tickets and to promise they will continue to play because somebody eventually does win. Fueling that drive has been almost nonstop media coverage that has pumped up the jackpot and the sales, some of which go to help defray government and educational expenses. So many people were trying to buy tickets that by midday Tuesday, the jackpot had jumped from $586 million to $636 million, the second-largest ever.

“For us, the main thing we’d like to get across is the level of excitement we saw all across California,” California Lottery spokesman Alex Traverso told the Associated Press. “At one point, we were selling about 25,000 tickets per minute.”

“It’s been an amazing experience. It’s unbelievable,” he said.

The mood was just as exuberant at Gateway Newsstand in Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead area, where one of the winning tickets was sold.

Newsstand owner Young Soolee was grinning ear to ear, according to televised images when she arrived Wednesday morning at the shop off the lobby of the Alliance Center office building. The newsstand--familiar to anyone who has ever visited an office building, courthouse or a mall--is a small, long shop with one register. Soolee makes her living on churn since only a handful of customers can be in the shop at any one time.

“I’m so excited and so happy now,” Soolee told reporters. “I love my store and the customers now.”

Buckhead is a financial center of Atlanta and one of its largest neighborhoods, known for upscale shopping centers. The Alliance Center is home to a variety of offices — lawyers and financial services professionals.

The California ticket was sold at Jennifer’s Gift Shop, which sits along San Jose’s Tully Road, amid a cluster of Asian restaurants. The store’s owner, Thuy Nguyen, told KNTV he doesn’t know who the bought the winning ticket, but it’s likely someone he knows — most of his customers are his friends. “I feel good! I don’t even know, I can’t sleep tonight,” Nguyen told the station.

For those who still don’t know, the winning numbers in the drawing were: 8, 14, 17, 20, 39; Mega Ball: 7.

The jackpot was the second-largest lottery prize in U.S. history. It started its ascent Oct. 4.

Twenty-two draws came and went without winners, each time upping the tension, excitement and fevered dreams as the jackpot climbed in value.

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