NO PAYNE, NO GAMES

By MICHAEL KRANTZ/ATLANTA

Billy Payne's first great burst of inspiration arrived on the morning of Feb. 8, 1987. He was addressing his church congregation during the dedication of a sanctuary whose fund-raising committee he had chaired, and as he gazed out at the smiling faces of his friends, he experienced a rush of emotion at the pleasure and pride they all felt at the spirit of sacrifice that produced this noble moment. "Boy, that was a great feeling," he recalls telling his wife Martha later that day. "We gotta think of something else that will bring people together in that kind of joyous celebration."

His second great inspiration came the next day at his law office, when he realized to his surprise just what that Something Else was. "I went home that night," he says, "walked into the kitchen and said, 'How you doing, Martha? We're going to bring the Olympics to Atlanta.'"

A decade later, the prophet stands at the sixth-floor balcony outside his office at the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (A.C.O.G.), surveying his sweltering promised land. To the north lie the new Olympic Village dorms and the aquatic center; right below him to the west is Centennial Olympic Park, swarming with scores of road-paving, tent-erecting workers frantically engaged in the last-second realization of his vision.

But right now, as usual, his eyes are on the future. "All of this, right back through there," he says, his hand traversing the horizon from the CNN Center-dominated southwest skyline up north past the big red Nike swoosh and into the northwest wasteland, that crumbling welter of faded-brick buildings and crack-vial sidewalks whose putative renewal could turn out to be these Games' most enduring local legacy. "This," the prophet says with unfathomable certitude, "is where it's all going to grow."

The thing to remember about Payne is that until a prophet proves himself, he pretty much comes off as a blowhard. An obscure real estate lawyer winning the Olympics for Atlanta? The city laughed--until he pulled it off. Build the largest urban park America has seen in decades, thereby changing Atlanta history? The city hasn't stopped laughing at that one. Yet.

Payne is a tall, lean, all-American man: a jowlier Tom Brokaw in a red, white and blue tie. He shakes hands firmly and stands with his face too close to yours. When he's kept waiting, he whistles impatiently and claps one hand over a closed fist. He has spent his life emulating a father who asked him, "Did you do the best you could?" Young Billy could never answer yes. He's still trying. Despite a deadly family cardiac history and, at 48, two bypasses to call his own, Payne is, to say the least, driven. "You wake up and devote the entirety of your energy and focus to what you're trying to do," he says. "You work till you physically drop, then you go home and come back the next day and do it all over again."

In a sense, Payne obviates the distinction between prophet and blowhard, for a blowhard isn't necessarily wrong, and most prophets are willing to cut corners in the service of their vision's greater glory.

Take, for instance, the way he portrayed Atlanta's July climate to the I.O.C. "We presented a scale that shows the average daytime high [in Atlanta] from July 19 to Aug. 4," says Payne, "and that number is 87.6 [degrees]. We then, of course, gave them the average daytime low." Then, with an aw-shucks grin that suggests he knows he pulled a fast one, Payne delivers his punch line: "They [averaged] them and came out with 75 [degrees]. We just gave them the facts--we didn't tell them how to do the arithmetic."

It is precisely this genial shiftiness that makes his neighbors a bit uneasy. The city gaped when, against all odds, Payne and his partners--a group of Friends of Billy now known as the Atlanta Nine--managed to seduce first the U.S. Olympic Committee and then the I.O.C. into choosing Atlanta for the '96 Games. "We traveled exhaustively around the world for 2 1/2 years," says Payne. His strategy? "Instead of going out there and talking about how our airport is better than the competition's or Atlanta's got x number of hotel rooms, what we needed to do was convince them of our sincerity."

In fact, say Olympic insiders, the I.O.C. was more impressed by A.C.O.G.'s biracial makeup, most notably the involvement of then Mayor Andrew Young. But at any rate, after the victory, sincerity gave way to sponsorships and spreadsheets, and the city recoiled at A.C.O.G.'s unseemly maneuverings, noting with distaste everything from the usual corporate-honchos-first ticket-distribution policy to Payne's infamous $600,000-plus salary--a national record for a nonprofit executive.

Whether he's actually earned it won't be clear until the dust has settled. Payne's Atlanta Games face a tough comparison to Peter Ueberroth's Los Angeles extravaganza, which earned a tidy $250 million surplus in 1984. A.C.O.G., by contrast, despite massive private investment and corporate sponsorships, still faces a potential $100 million shortfall. The balance, Payne insists, will come from such revenue gold mines as sales of tickets, licensing merchandise and food and beverages. Besides, he adds, A.C.O.G. "made a $500 million profit the first day." He's referring to the third of A.C.O.G.'s $1.7 billion budget that has gone to building projects that will be donated to the city and private universities once the Games are over: a $50 million investment in dormitories, nearly half a billion dollars in sporting facilities and, of course, Centennial Olympic Park. Deficit or no, A.C.O.G.'s legacy will be considerable.

"These will be the best-organized and most efficiently managed Games in the history of the Olympic movement," Payne promises. Visionary or blowhard? Next week reality will start testing his rhetoric. "You never get to rest," he says. "You never get to say it's done." One suspects that for Billy Payne, resting and saying it's done would be the hardest job of all.