Profile; Loser at his own Games: Billy Payne

There is, today, a terrible irony in the way Billy Payne likes to remember the moment in February 1987 when, at four o'clock in the morning, in his office, squinting at notes he had scribbled to himself, he decided that he was going to bring the Centennial Olympic Games to Atlanta, Georgia. "Boom!" he tells people. "The O-word came out. That was it!"

The awful inappropriateness, the hideously unwitting prescience, of those words will be haunting him now. And, despite his brave call yesterday "to rejuvenate the spirit of Atlanta", Billy Payne, formerly the world's greatest optimist, could be forgiven for wishing that the revelation had not come to him that morning, that he had not decided to abandon his life as he had known it, quit his job as a property lawyer in Dunwoody, Georgia, and dedicate himself for the next three years to the mission of delivering the 1996 Olympic Games to Atlanta.

But, eyes set unflinchingly on the prize, that is what he did. The Games are his games. He had the idea; against all odds he sold it; and today - as president of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (Acog), earning an annual salary of $669,112 - he is the man in charge, presiding over a shattered dream.

History written the Payne Way should have recorded a triumphant, joyful, American-affirming Games to cap his coup in persuading the International Olympic Committee to award the Centennial Games not to Athens, but to Atlanta. Even before the explosion and deaths of yesterday, though, Payne's dream had been stuttering badly, with veteran sportswriters describing these Games as the most chaotically mismanaged event of their kind in living memory.

At a press conference in Atlanta on Wednesday, angry foreign journalists pilloried Payne, demanding he explain why the computers were not delivering the results on time, why the transport system had collapsed. ("Getting out of Vietnam," one German journalist wrote, "was easier than getting back to my hotel.") Payne regretted the difficulties but in the same breath intimated that the foreign media, in contrast to the patriotically discreet Americans, were being mean-spirited. "I believe what we have is a celebration of the Games," he said. "I think people are rejoicing in the streets ... What you see as a challenge, I see as a party."

WILLIAM Porter Payne is a man whose most valuable asset, until now, has been a tirelessly optimistic, puerile intelligence. Now all his famous can-do quotes are brushed with the blackness that terrorism brings. He promised before the Games began that these would be "the most memorable Olympics ever"; "the best Olympic Games of all time"; "the greatest peace-time event of the 20th century". But amid that brashness, the consequent grimness and whatever the rest of Atlanta may bring, it should not be forgotten that Payne, in realising his dream of bringing the Games to Atlanta - when Athens was a rival, when they had been held in the US only 12 years earlier - did achieve the impossible.

Despite immense initial scepticism, and with no idea of the magnitude of the venture he was undertaking, he managed to enlist the support, first, of the city's black political leadership, beginning with Andrew Young, Atlanta's mayor in 1987; then he mortgaged his home, raised a $1.5m loan and sold the plan to the city's white business leaders; then he sold it to America's big corporations, several of whom he persuaded to part with $40m in sponsorship money, 10 times what they had paid at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles; and finally he sold it to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), eminences inhabiting a world of intrigue and Vatican solemnity whom he would address at conferences in Geneva with a "Hey, king!" and a "Hey, prince!", all the time sporting a button on his lapel that read, "I'm Billy Payne".

With his boyish charm, theatrics, lots of money and a touch of guile - saying that the average summer temperature in Atlanta was 75F, when in truth daytime averages are 20 degrees hotter - he talked the IOC into awarding him the big prize. And all this from a small-time lawyer who had never witnessed an Olympic event, had never done business abroad and whose only experience of management, by his own admission, had been in his son's Little League baseball team.

It is a uniquely American story, like the one about the young woman at the Los Angeles cocktail party who, when she was asked whether she played the piano, replied: "I don't know. I haven't tried."

But Payne has deeper resources to draw on than can-do. He was inspired in his Olympic crusade by God, Dad and Country. An evangelical Christian, he was communing with the heavens that fateful morning when he received word of what his mission in life would be. His father, who is now dead, never quite heaped on him the praise he craved. And as for his country, this extract from a speech he gave early last year to his assembled Acog staff is not untypical: "It's impossible for us not to achieve an overwhelming success, because this is the United States of America. We're doing something that's more important than any of us. This thing has virtually limitless potential - if we do it right - to affect humanity. This is it, man! This is it! And I do believe we're gonna do it, for sure!"

What chance did the woebegone Olympic bidders of Athens - never mind Manchester - have against that? Payne, the salesman messiah, believes that he is responding to a divine calling. "The Olympics," he has said time and again, "is an idea founded in goodness"; "the highest and greatest manifestation of the human spirit". He is the Billy Graham of international sport, the preacher of the Olympic gospel. Asked once to account for his success, he responded with a quote from Kierkegaard: "Purity of heart is to will one thing."

In the purity of his childhood he revealed early on a single-minded desire to win that at times frightened his family, not least his grandfather whom he played draughts against with an almost psychotic competitiveness, collapsing in despair when he lost. His father only made the obsessiveness worse. "My daddy always said, 'Never was a horse that couldn't be rode or a rider that couldn't be throwed'," Payne likes to tell his audiences. "He would say, 'Billy, if you're not smarter than a lot of people or a better athlete than somebody you can always outwork them'."

Billy turned out to be a better athlete than most, a star of the Georgia University American football team. He was smart, too. He does not shrink from informing people that he was a "straight-A's" student. But when young Billy would rush to his father for approval he would always reply - and this is a story every citizen of Atlanta knows by heart now: "Doesn't matter, Billy. The only thing that matters is, did you do your best?"

"Never once in those hundreds or thousands of conversations with my dad," Payne relates, wearing his super-ego on his sleeve, "could I ever respond that, yes, I had done my best. So I think it's kind of obvious what motivates me now."

As it was in his God Bless America address to the Acog troops when he explained how intimately connected were his Olympic dream and his quest for paternal recognition. He turned his eyes to an Olympic brick on which his father's name, Porter Otis Payne, was engraved, and he said, his voice cracking, "I am going to have accomplished something I was never able to accomplish in my relationship with my daddy." Then he burst out crying.

Payne's Freudian self-portrait would not be complete had he neglected to mention his fixation with death. A healthy fixation, psychologists might say, because it is one that, like all his deepest secrets, he cheerfully acknowledges. He is 48 but family precedent tells him he does not have long to live. His sister died of cancer aged 40; his father of a heart attack at 53. He himself has undergone two triple by-pass operations, the first when he was 34, the second - with the Olympic preparations at full steam - in 1993.

The first time he spent his convalescence raising $2.5m for his local Presbyterian church; the second he was back at work within a month. But he has had to modify his work schedule. "You can't change your personality," he told the Atlanta Constitution, "but maybe you can change how many hours a day you subject your body to your personality." So now he is in the office at five in the morning instead of four. And occasionally he will indulge himself with a solitary game of dawn golf. He plays alone because no one else is up at such a time and because he scorches around the course at such a pace that he defeats the object of what most players tend to view as a gentle, contemplative sport.

A sprinter in the marathon of life, what Payne seeks is immortality, to be told by the world that, yes, yes, he did his best. He longs for it, in the innocent American way, badly, with child-like candour. It is his tragedy that his innocence should have been so cruelly treated; and that a different kind of immortality now beckons him and his Games.

It wasn't enough: Billy Payne's father told him to do his best, and he tried Photograph: ALLSPORT