After Bringing The Olympics To Atlanta, Billy Payne Takes The Lead At Augusta National

After Bringing The Olympics To Atlanta, Billy Payne Takes The Lead At Augusta National

Because Billy Payne had studied up on everyone from the king of Bhutan to Arkansas' favorite son, he knew what to say to Bill Clinton, and how to say it. So Payne suggested they play golf sometime. When Clinton said yes, the smiling Payne added a promise. He told the president of the United States and the leader of the free world, "I'm gonna whup your ass."

There came a heartbeat's silence from Clinton.

Then, a roar of laughter.

"You had two strong leaders, two sons of the South in Billy Payne and Bill Clinton," says Mack McLarty, a boyhood friend who became Clinton's most trusted political adviser. "The president had met 'Billy Payne'—the strong, entrepreneurial, Southern charmer—a hundred times before he met Billy Payne. What Billy said, he said in just the right manner.

"The president loved it."

Payne had been just another Atlanta lawyer shuffling real-estate papers. Clinton had been the boy governor of a state that didn't matter. But at the moment of their meeting, in the run-up to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, they were high-flying players on the world stage. Payne not only conceived the idea of the Games in his hometown, he made it happen, just as Clinton transformed implausibility into reality by winning the presidency.

McLarty had it right. William Jefferson Clinton of Arkansas knew William Porter Payne of Georgia. Because he became president by working with his own beguiling audacity, Bill also knew this about Billy: When a son of the South smiles and says he's gonna whup your ass, he intends to whup your ass.

Billy Payne is a master at it. At 6-feet-2 and 230 pounds, playing alongside future NFL stars at the University of Georgia, he was an all-conference defensive end. Now 59 years old, he has survived two triple-bypass heart operations and a family history of heart disease; both his father, the Georgia football legend Porter Payne, and Porter's father died early of heart attacks. Not only did Billy persuade International Olympic Committee members to give the Games to a city some couldn't find on a globe, he also wheedled $40 million sponsorships from corporate chieftains who once refused his phone calls.

Not to mention winning a bride. On first meeting Martha Beard at a fraternity party, Payne told her, repeatedly, "I'm really a nice guy when I'm sober." To prove it, he showed up the next morning in her dorm lobby. Three years later, June 29, 1968, they were married. Thirty-eight years and counting.

The victories surprise no one who has been in Payne's force field. "Billy was extremely competitive," says Vince Dooley, his coach at Georgia in the late 1960s. "The most competitive individual I've ever known," says Dick Yarbrough, a key man on Payne's staff during the Olympics. An Atlanta businessman long familiar with Payne sees a resolute man practiced in the nuances of the competitive art: "The quintessential, modern-day good ol' boy. A chameleon. Intimidating, yet polite. Loud, yet courteous. Smart, though aw-shucks."

The latest measure of Payne's grit, guile and doggedness is his comeback from a decade-long drift after the Games. As nice as a seven-figure rainmaker job and board memberships are—Payne is now a partner in Gleacher Partners, a New York-based investment firm with offices in Atlanta-—they do not satisfy a man who lusts for the arena's heat. "He was making money, but I think Billy felt useless," says Melissa Turner, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter on the Payne beat for years. Exacerbating the emptiness was a consensus that the Olympics, stigmatized by a fatal bombing and trashed by a cheesy downtown flea-market bazaar, had failed to put Atlanta among the great international cities. Then a federal investigation of a Salt Lake City bid for the Winter Olympics spilled over onto Payne's team with charges of vote-buying.

"In the early '90s, people talked about Billy as the next governor," says Marty Appel, who directed the Olympics public-relations staff for 18 months. "Then he had to almost go into hiding after the Games. It was a shame, because he is a man with great charisma who I think is a genuine hero for Atlanta history books."

Now Payne steps again into the arena. In May 2006, nine years after becoming a member, Payne was named the sixth chairman of Augusta National Golf Club. This April he presides over the club's Masters Tournament for the first time. An extraordinary exception to the rule of Augusta chairmen unfamiliar to the public, Payne comes to the job as a celebrity. But rather than make clear how he'll perform as chairman, his public profile is so rich in detail it can support what would seem to be contradictory conclusions. He could deliver Augusta National directly from the 19th century to the 21st. He also could be the man Augusta's members have proved they want, Clifford Roberts re-born.