(My former employers at Newsday chose not to use this obituary, prepared when I still worked there fulltime. But it already was written and just sitting in my file cabinet, so…..)
Ted Turner, the firebrand media mogul who founded CNN, colorized movie classics, pioneered cable television’s superstation concept with the Atlanta Braves as its centerpiece, captained an America’s Cup sailing winner and credited himself with ending the Cold War by creating the Olympic-style Goodwill Games in the mid-1980s, died Wednesday. He was 87.
[He had been diagnosed eight years ago with Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.]
By turns charming and irreverent, witty and rude, Turner went through life in a manner that was not so much brusque as antsy, always itching to move to another topic, another passion.
He gained (and occasionally lost) enormous wealth, delighting in throwing money at his favorite causes, including an unprecedented $1 billion gift to support the United Nations. A 1996 partnership with Time Warner and subsequent acquisition by AOL led to Turner’s net worth tumbling $7 billion over two years when AOL shares collapsed. But in his many adventures, Turner argued that “you don’t evaluate everything on whether it makes a profit. Mother Teresa didn’t make a profit, you know.”
Behind a twinkly smile and booming drawl, Turner unabashedly offered his opinions on matters from world peace to tabloid journalism, from religion to politics. It was not unusual for him to lecture complete strangers passing on the street—“Smoking’s bad for you!”—or to inveigh against what he considered wrongheaded behavior, especially when it came to his great media rival Rupert Murdoch.
A lifelong Republican and capitalist to the core, Turner nevertheless could not be categorized, espousing investments in environmental concerns over armaments, going duck hunting with U.S. arch-enemy Fidel Castro of Cuba and even marrying actress Jane Fonda, who was pilloried by conservatives as Hanoi Jane, the sweetheart of the left during the Vietnam War days.
Fonda was the third of Turner’s marriages—after Judy Nye and Jane Shirley Smith—all of which ended in divorce. In a 2012 television interview, Turner said he had four girlfriends and described his dating situation as complicated but easier than being married.
His ownership of the Atlanta Braves began when he acquired the rights, in 1973, to carry their games on his Atlanta-based cable station—channel 17—which he beamed throughout the country, promoting the Braves as “America’s Team.” To plug his station, he suggested that star pitcher Andy Messersmith, who wore No. 17, change his name to “Channel” to be stitched on his uniform about his number. (League president Chub Feeney nixed the idea.)
In 1977, during a 16-game Braves losing streak, Turner sent manager Dave Bristol out of town on a “scouting trip” and made himself interim manager. After one game, a Braves loss to Pittsburgh, Feeney ordered Turner out of the dugout.
Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium, built to host the 1996 Games, was retrofitted for baseball the next year, renamed Turner Field and remained the Braves home until 2017.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938 in Cincinnati, the son of Robert Edward II, a billboard magnate, and Florence Rooney. When Ted was 9, the family moved to Savannah, Ga. He attended an exclusive private boys school in Chattanooga, Tenn., and studied the classics and economics at Brown University, but never graduated, expelled for having a female student in his dorm room. (Brown gave him an honorary bachelor’s degree in 1989.) When his father committed suicide in 1963, Turner—then 24—inherited the family business and began building his own media empire.
A skilled sailor, Turner failed in four attempts to make the U.S. Olympic team. But he captained the 1977 America’s Cup winner, appearing for the post-race news conference with a bottle of booze and a cigar, proclaiming, “I love everybody in this room tonight,” and proceeding to fall off his chair.
It was his love of the Olympics, and President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games—which was followed by the Soviet Union’s boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic in retaliation—that moved Turner to create the Goodwill Games to “break this string of boycotts and end the Cold War.”
U.S.-Soviet athletic duels were a focus of the Olympic-style Goodwill Games, staged in Moscow in 1986, and Olympic boycotts by major nations indeed were ended for the 1988 Seoul Games. The Goodwill Games went to Seattle in 1990, to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1994, to New York in 1998 and to Brisbane, Australia in 2001 before disappearing.
But Turner had moved on to bigger things, including becoming the largest private landowner in the United States, and nothing ever dented his self-confidence. “If I only had a little humility,” he once said, “I’d be perfect.”