Cable television guru Ted Turner, who also owned the Atlanta Braves, Hawks and Thrashers, huddled with Forbes.com contributor Terence Moore before a Hawks game at Philips Arena (now State Farm Arena) during the early 2000s.
From Terence Moore
During the fall of 1982, I first met Ted Turner, and it was the strangest thing. It ranks among my most unforgettable moments after nearly 50 years as a professional sports journalist.
How unforgettable?
Everything you need to know about the essence of this otherworldly, charismatic and (fill in the blank with nearly any adjective involving brilliance) entrepreneur who Forbes said was worth $2.8 billion at the time of his death Wednesday at 87 – well, let’s just say it all surfaced back then.
About that Turner moment: I covered the 1982 San Francisco Giants for the San Francisco Examiner, and they traveled to Atlanta in early August to face a slumping Braves team that nevertheless had a healthy lead over the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Giants in the National League West, the division for all three teams during those days.
The Braves were flashing relevance for the first time since the late 1960s, when Hank Aaron ripped pitches during his prime in the same lineup with sluggers Rico Carty, Orlando Cepeda and others.
So this was an intriguing story.
I figured, “Why not start at the top?”
Robert Edward Turner III.
He hadn’t become the Ted Turner of Jane Fonda, or of the $1 billion donation to the United Nations Foundation, or of the owner of more bison than anybody on the planet, but he was notable enough.
This Ted Turner used to sell newspapers in his native Cincinnati at 8 years old on street corners for a nickel. At 25, he took over his deceased father’s billboard business in 1963. Then, seven years later, he began making “visionary” his unofficial nickname after he used $2.5 million to buy Channel 17, a floundering UHF TV station in Atlanta.
ATLANTA – JANUARY 28: Cable television mogul Ted Turner is photographed at his desk in his office at Turner Broadcasting System on January 28, 1977 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Tom Hill/WireImage)
WireImage
Turner changed the call letters from WJRJ to WTCG (as in Watch This Channel Grow), and then the following happened: It became a superstation that televised every Atlanta Braves game throughout the nation after Turner purchased the franchise for $10 million in 1976 for programming purposes.
In case you’re wondering, the current Braves are eighth on Forbes’ list for team valuations at $3.33 billion.
Not only that, but the superstation inspired Turner during the summer of 1980 to become the father of cable news television with the launch of CNN. He eventually formed CNN Headline News, CNN International, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), TNT and the Cartoon Network.
But back to that Turner moment.
Soon after my West Coast flight touched the Dixie runway, I headed in my rental car toward downtown Atlanta and Turner’s TV complex. It didn’t look the part. The place called “The Mansion” during its Turner years was a former country club of three stories and red brick with large white columns.
The whole structure was built just after the World War, you know, the first one, and I walked inside as a confident general.
The secretary at the front desk treated me like a corporal.
“Do you have an appointment to see Mr. Turner?” she said, looking ready to signal for security. But just before I prepared to say, “Oh, um, no,” Turner walked around the corner.
He heard the conversation and invited me to his office.
We talked for more than an hour.
He was great.
I asked Turner about the Braves’ present and future. They had young standouts Dale Murphy, Bob Horner and Claudell Washington in their everyday lineup as 20 somethings, and future Hall of Famer Phil Niekro formed a pitching staff with the efficient Rick Mahler and noted closer Gene Garber.
“We’re going to have a dynasty. Why not? Everybody else has one, so why not us?” said Turner, with a straight face from behind his desk, and he was nearly right, but he was off by a decade.
Baseball: Closeup of Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner victorious in stands during game at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Atlanta, GA 5/1/1976 – 5/31/1976 CREDIT: John Iacono (Photo by John Iacono /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (Set Number: X20557 )
Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
After that 1982 season, when the Braves won their first division title since 1969 before they collapsed in the playoffs to the St. Louis Cardinals, they folded down the stretch in 1983 to finish second in the NL West.
For the next few years, the Braves fluctuated between bad and awful until Turner did something he hadn’t done since buying the Braves.
He got out of the way.
He banished the Ted Turner who once pushed manager Dave Bristol aside in 1977 after a 16-game losing streak to manage the Braves himself (a loss, by the way). That was before baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn told Turner to stay upstairs in his owner’s box or downstairs in his nearby dugout seat or back home in his easy chair watching the game on his superstation.
This was the new Ted Turner.
With the 1986 season approaching, Turner enticed former Braves manager Bobby Cox to leave his job in that role with the Toronto Blue Jays to become general manager. Cox combined with then-Braves farm director Aaron to spend the latter part of that decade acquiring Hall of Famers and All-Stars in waiting such as Tom Glavine, David Justice and John Smoltz.
Those players contributed to 1991, when Cox left the Braves’ front office to manage the team again after his first stint from 1978 through 1981. They went from last in the division the previous season to the World Series. Even though they lost a Game 7 thriller to the Minnesota Twins, another worst-to-first bunch, they proceeded to win a Major League record 14 consecutive division titles. That included five NL pennants and the 1995 world championship.
During much of that run, Turner and wife Fonda spent Octobers on national TV as the faces of the franchise. They often were joined in their box seats during home playoff games by former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, both Georgia natives. They wore Braves caps and huge smiles while leading the chopping and the chanting of Braves fans.
That part of the Ted Turner fairy tale ended in a flash after his Braves just missed beating the New York Yankees for consecutive world titles.
According to Forbes: “Turner sold to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock in 1996 and saw his fortune tumble when Time Warner bought AOL in 2001, causing shares to drop.”
1991: Atlanta Braves team owner Ted Turner is seen with wife Jane Fonda in the stands during a 1991 season MLB game. (Photo by Focus on Sport/Getty Images)
1991 Focus on Sport
Turner ended his association with AOL Time Warner in 2006 (along with his cable entities, the Braves and the Hawks, his other sports team in addition to the Thrashers before they left for another NHL city), but he continued his charitable works. They ranged from advocating for clean water everywhere to curbing population growth for environmental purposes.
No way such a man could remain outside of public view for the last few weeks, months and years of his life, but he did.
And this wasn’t just any man.
Turner always made himself available to me, especially after I moved from San Francisco to Atlanta in 1985 to become a general sports columnist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Once, when I was on the entertainment committee of the local chapter of the National Black MBA Association during the late 1980s, I suggested Turner as a guest speaker for our yearly banquet in town. My fellow committee members agreed, and when I called Turner, he told me to have his secretary put the date that was months away on his calendar.
The day before the event, Turner’s secretary called me.
I thought she was going to cancel.
Instead, she wanted to know the time again of the event, which was 7 p.m. for the speaker, but Turner showed up with his date (before he was married to Fonda) long before the reception at 6 p.m.
They stayed from that point until after the program, shaking hands, signing autographs and telling stories.
Which brings me to the present and then back to the past.
Sixteen years before Turner announced in 2018 on CBS Sunday Morning that he was suffering from Lewy body dementia, he founded Ted’s Montana Grill, a nationwide restaurant that served bison instead of beef. During the early 2000s, he moved into a penthouse apartment above the same building that featured his Atlanta restaurant on the ground floor, and the location was within walking distance to the CNN Center, the impressive piece of architecture that opened for his TV operations in 1987.
In contrast, I was at the old Turner TV place that fall of 1982, when Ted asked me a question at the end of our lengthy talk.
“Where do you live in San Francisco?” Turner said, leaning forward with an intense expression.
“You mean, the exact location?” I replied as he nodded, and then I told him about my apartment complex across from Lake Merced near the Pacific Ocean before he delivered the most important question of all in his mind.
“Do you have cable?” Turner said with wide eyes.
I told him, “No,” especially since I barely knew what cable was back then beyond the kind holding up the Golden Gate Bridge.
Then Turner handed me a notepad, and he said, “Write down the address, and I’ll take care of it.”
I jotted down the information.
We got cable.
Thanks again, Ted.
