Games Saver, continued

Born to Run

The son of the late George Romney, former governor of Michigan and a onetime presidential candidate, Romney avers that he held no political aspirations when he was a student or early in his career. He was more focused on not flunking out of law school (he said hornbooks saved him), juggling the workload with his business studies, and finding a good first job. Yet, Romney said, "My dad is someone who I've subconsciously patterned my life after. He was someone who had a very strong sense of public service, which is something that, as I've gotten a little older, seems to have sprung up in me as well."

His subsequent success in the business world gave him the freedom to follow his father's example. He claims little credit for his financial gains; if you didn't make money as an investment manager in the '80s and early '90s, he says, you were in the wrong profession. It was like winning the lottery, and just as some lottery winners grasp the opportunity to change their lives, so did he. Except instead of retiring to an island somewhere, he decided to run for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994. It was not unlike the U.S. men's hockey team going up against the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics. But at least in that competition, the U.S. team had the home advantage.

"If I were aiming towards politics, it would have been Michigan, where I could have built on personal relationships and an extraordinary reputation for my father and my mother," said Romney. "Massachusetts was not the place for a white, male, Mormon millionaire Republican to consider a political life."

He learned a lot from that race, in which he garnered 41 percent of the vote. One lesson, Romney often jokes, was never to run against a Kennedy in Massachusetts. The Kennedy campaign was widely credited for cementing a victory by questioning the business practices of a man who prizes ethics in personal and civic life. Even with the bruises of the campaign, however, Romney also learned that he would like to run for office again.

He just doesn't know when or where that race will be. In August he announced that he would not return to Bain Capital in order to "look for opportunities to make further contributions in the public service arena." He has a home in Belmont, Mass., but said he will not run for governor against Jane Swift, a fellow Republican and acting governor of the state. Utah, where he has a second home in Park City, is a possibility too. Before starting at the SLOC, he lived in the state full-time only when he was a college student at Brigham Young University, but his roots there run deep. His parents were raised in Utah. His great-grandparents walked across the plains to get there, part of a migration of people seeking religious freedom who established the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

That heritage motivated him to leave a comfortable life in Massachusetts. So did his wife, Ann, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis shortly before he was offered the SLOC job. Ann, an equestrian and skier whose health has improved in the great outdoors of Utah, convinced him that he was ideally suited to help a city that was being defined by scandal, Romney said. And there was another reason.

"The Olympics has a very noble purpose, and I've become sort of philosophical in this regard, but it has a very important purpose on the world stage, and it was in trouble," he said. "That was an overwhelmingly powerful draw for me."

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