Atlanta’s Ringleader : It’s 150 Days to Start of the Summer Games and the Realization of Billy Payne’s Dream

One hundred fifty days from today, Billy Payne’s vision will become reality with the opening ceremony of the Centennial Olympics in Atlanta. Or at least that was among the themes of an interview with him last week over drinks at the Beverly Wilshire. But Payne, so clever that he never lets on how clever, rejects the V-word as too grand for a simple country boy.

“I hate the word vision,” says the president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG). Or, as he would have been more effectively introduced in his environment at that particular moment, Atlanta’s Peter Ueberroth.

“I had an idea,” Payne says, “although it was a pretty good idea. Who’s going to argue about bringing the Olympics to your hometown? They might have had doubts, but they didn’t argue.”

They were too stunned. The first person he told of his idea in February 1987 was his wife, Martha. “She said I was crazy,” Payne says. Even so, he ran it past Atlanta’s distinguished mayor at the time. Andrew Young, a diplomat in a previous career, now refers to the subsequent one-sided conversation as “Billy’s impossible dream.” But six years ago, Young, asked to describe his impression of Payne on that occasion, said, “This guy’s a nut.”

Knowing all that he knows now, Payne, 48, would be the first to agree. He confesses that he had no clue about the process of bidding for the Summer Olympics, and, even if he had, he did not know when the next ones were available. He had never even heard of the International Olympic Committee. If someone had told him that the father of the modern Olympic movement was Pierre Cardin instead of Pierre de Coubertin, Payne could not have argued.

Nine years later, Payne is the Olympics’ No. 1 disciple, calling the Games “the greatest example of international cooperation and friendship in the world today.”

Payne, trained in the law of real estate but born to sell it, often speaks in absolutes. Taking snippets from previous interviews with him, he sees the 17 days between July 19 and Aug. 4 of this year as “the best Olympic Games of all time” as well as “the most important peacetime event of the 20th Century” and “the most important event in the history of Atlanta, Georgia.”

If many Atlantans are still wondering about the price they will have to pay for that occasion, Payne is not. A private man who enjoys nothing more in the evenings than putting his feet up at home and watching sports on television, he has become the most public of figures. He has had to contend with pickets outside his house, verbal floggings from every political, philosophical and social faction in the city, almost daily media scrutiny and, oh yes, a second coronary bypass operation in 1993.

But he has persevered, and, while he is the first to concede to critics that he could have achieved little without the assistance of ACOG co-chairman Young, chief operating officer A.D. Frazier Jr. and others, Payne obviously takes personal pride in his frequent proclamation that preparation for the 1996 Summer Olympics is “on time and on budget.”

Considering that ACOG’s budget is an Olympic-record $1.7 billion, including $550 million in building projects, it is no small accomplishment that Payne, in Los Angeles to meet with producers of the opening ceremony, is able to leisurely sip a Southern health concoction--orange juice and Jack Daniels--and say that he has little to do over the next five months except keep up the morale of the troops. By July 19, ACOG will have 70,000 full-time employees and volunteers.

“I think people want to worry, so I hate to give this answer,” Payne says. “But the hardest thing we’ve got to do is wait until it gets here.”

Despite his never-wavering optimism in discussions with the media about finances, Payne exhaled loudly after ACOG’s last quarterly statement indicated that the Olympics, barring a catastrophe, indeed will not lose money. He retreated a long time ago from his original projection that they would generate a surplus of $130 million and has been particularly defensive when confronted with the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee’s $225-million profit in 1984.

“It was unfair for anyone to compare us to L.A.,” Payne says, pointing out that ACOG had to fund the construction and reconstruction of numerous facilities, including the new $207-million, 85,000-seat main stadium, while Los Angeles had the majority of its venues in place.

But just as it is natural to compare the Games of Atlanta and Los Angeles, so too has Payne been measured against Ueberroth. They had almost nothing in common when they began their Olympic experiences. Ueberroth was an established, millionaire entrepreneur who had his own worldwide travel agency and was hired by those who brought the Olympics to Los Angeles. Payne was a relatively anonymous, $250,000-a-year real estate lawyer who had never even been abroad and was hired because he brought the Olympics to Atlanta.

Some say that Ueberroth’s success has been an “albatross” to Payne. He denies it, but even if it is so, Payne says there is no rivalry between them.

“I have found him to be invaluable to me because he’s the only living American who knows the pressure I am now under,” Payne says. “He’s an example of someone who had the job who is decidedly smarter than me. He brought a business acumen to the table, which I did not. I have tried to acquire it, sometimes with his help. He also brought a certainty of success. I brought passion.”

*

A short time after Atlanta won the right from the IOC in 1990 to organize the XXVI Summer Games, Joey Reiman, who owns an advertising agency in Atlanta, told the Wall Street Journal, “Every Emerald City is based on a dream, and Billy is the greatest of dreamers.”

That is what Payne was doing--dreaming--on Feb. 8, 1987, when he arrived upon “an idea founded in goodness.” Inspired by his involvement in a fund-raising project to add a sanctuary to his church, St. Luke’s Presbyterian, he said that the experience of building something from nothing was richer than practicing law.

“I was thinking love of sport and love of the community and that the Olympics was a combination of those two,” he says.

He formed a bid committee and raised $7 million for the three-year campaign but accepted no salary, paying his family’s bills from a $1.5-million loan against his real estate holdings. Today, he is offended by the media attention directed toward his salary this year of $669,112, the most for any paid executive of a nonprofit corporation in the United States, saying that he will still owe $572,000 on the loan when the Games end.

Payne knows that Atlantans would never have gotten through the doors of many IOC voters if not for Young, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who has connections throughout the world. But once they were inside, it was Payne’s job to sell the city.

There were numerous obstacles, the first being that several IOC members believed they were listening to a pitch from Atlantic City instead of Atlanta. “They were always asking us about our slot machines,” Young said. The largest hurdle was the sentimental assumption that the Centennial Games belonged in the city of their origin in 1896, Athens, Greece.

But Payne went among the IOC’s princes, princesses, captains of industry and Olympic heroes with his “Hi, I’m Billy” button on his lapel, his sleeves rolled up, his necktie loosened and convinced them that the 1996 Summer Olympics should celebrate the next century instead of the past one. The New South versus Ancient Greece.

“To outsiders, we looked like a bunch of redneck Southerners, falling all over ourselves,” Payne once said of the bid committee. “But all those people were socially, financially and educationally the cream of the crop in this community. I’d put them up against anybody in the world.”

Many joined him on the organizing committee, and, together, they have weathered storms that included an embarrassing abandoned effort to have golf added to the Olympic program at restrictive Augusta National, a battle with Martin Luther King III over the site of the new main stadium and the lack of African American participation in decision making, barrels of toxic waste under the stadium, sinking dormitories in the athletes village and considerable public hand-wringing over finances, price gouging and construction-related traffic jams. But ACOG is still standing, on time and on budget.

“I have to confess to some private pleasure in those moments when we have proved the cynics wrong,” Payne says. “While I don’t gloat publicly, there have been wonderful private moments.”

*

Born in Athens, Ga., William Porter Payne was a high school quarterback who became an undersized All-Southeastern Conference defensive end at the University of Georgia. Coach Vince Dooley also used him at tight end, wide receiver and linebacker, saying that Payne had great skills at no position but could play almost all of them well because of his determination.

That was passed on to him by his late father, Porter Otis Payne, a Georgia football captain who played on the College All-Star team that beat the Philadelphia Eagles in 1950.

“The best lesson I ever learned was from my dad, who told me that there are a lot of people more talented than me but that I could control how hard I worked,” Payne says. “You can overcome anything by starting every day with an unrelenting work ethic.”

Asked if his Type-A personality has contributed to his health problems, which include a heart attack at 26, his first bypass operation at 34 and another three years ago, he says: “A little bit. But I will tell you that my problems more than any other factor come from genetics. I’m from the fifth straight generation of men under 35 to have major health problems. It’s fair to say that knowing the genes were not in my favor, the way I work would not be recommended for someone if their purpose is to see how long they can live as opposed to how much they can contribute.”

Amid jokes that the centerpiece of the Olympic venues would be named “Billy Payne Memorial Stadium” if he did not cut down his hours after the triple-bypass operation in 1993, he made a concession, now arriving at work at 5:30 a.m. instead of 4:30 a.m. “I haven’t changed my personality, but I have cut back the number of hours to which I subject my body to my personality,” he says.

Pseudo-psychologists have suggested that Payne would like to go out in a blaze of glory lighted by the Olympic flame, but he rejects that notion.

“This final-act thing that people try to say about me is an absolute joke,” he says. “I want to live until I’m 80, and I’m going to live until I’m 80.”

For his remaining decades, he says definitely that he plans to write a book and go fishing a lot and, more vaguely, become involved in an enterprise that takes advantage of his newfound international experience.

“I don’t want to think about it too much,” he recently told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “I’m too sentimental and I might . . .”

He left the word cry unspoken.

“How does it feel?” he said. “It’s obviously very mixed. After so much sacrifice of my family and friends, I’ll be glad to get back to a normal deal. But when it’s over, it is over. There no longer will be the excitement and anticipation. It will be a tremendous loss. I’m sure I’ll be waking up at 3:30 to discover I’ve got nowhere to go.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Payne Profile

* William Porter (Billy) Payne

* Title: President, Chief Executive Officer of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

* 1996 salary: $669,112.

* Birth date: Oct. 13, 1947.

* Birthplace: Athens, Ga.

* Education: University of Georgia Law School, 1973.

* Home: Atlanta.

* Family: Wife, Martha; daughter, Elizabeth, 25; son, William Jr., 21.

* Sports background: Defensive end at Georgia. All-Southeastern Conference, 1968.

* Profession: Real estate lawyer.

Atlanta’s Olympic Chronology

Significant dates in Atlanta’s Olympic experience:

Feb. 8, 1987--Billy Payne decides to approach Atlanta’s political, civic and business leaders about the possibility of a bid by the city for the 1996 Summer Olympics.

April 29, 1988--In a process that began with 14 cities, the U.S. Olympic Committee designates Atlanta over Minneapolis as the country’s representative in bidding for the Olympics.

Sept. 18, 1990--The International Olympic Committee gives Atlanta a fifth-ballot victory over sentimental favorite Athens.

Aug. 9, 1992--During the closing ceremony of the 1992 Summer Olympics, Barcelona’s mayor hands over the Olympic flag to Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson.

April 27, 1996--The 84-day, 15,000-mile torch relay through 42 states and Washington, D.C., will begin in Los Angeles.

May 19, 1996--The $207-million, 85,000-seat Olympic Stadium will officially open with an international track and field meet. After the Games, the stadium’s seating capacity will be reduced to 45,000 in time for the Atlanta Braves to open play there in 1997.

July 19, 1996--The opening ceremony will be held in the Olympic Stadium.

Aug. 4, 1996--Closing ceremony in the Olympic Stadium.