by Lisa Napoli
Atlanta Journal sportswriter Frank Hyland expressed his disgust not with a spell but with words: “Ted Turner has money. Ted Turner has a lot of money. Ted Turner has enthusiasm. Ted Turner has his own baseball team. Ted belongs to some of the world’s most prestigious clubs. But Ted Turner has no class.”
Ted’s classy response?
“The guy wrote that I have no class. Well, I don’t consider myself a classy person. Class is very low on my list of priorities. I’d rather have traits like courage and tenacity. For this particular guy to say I have no class, he’s a slovenly character who doesn’t even take care of his teeth. His teeth are rotting out of his face. I pay janitors more than he’s probably making. I bet ninety-nine point nine percent of the people would say I have more class than that guy.”
People in Braves Land were being treated to a crash course in what those in TV Land, Billboard Land, and Yacht Land already knew: Ted Turner was “a package of dynamite in those days with a bit of loose cannon thrown in,” observed Roger Vaughan, a Brown classmate who’d sailed with Ted and later wrote two books about him.
“Ted,” said front-office veteran Bill Lucas, “would make coffee nervous.”
And as Ted’s star ascended, Hope observed, what may have been seen before as simply crazy became legitimized as eccentric. That did not excuse, in his estimation, Ted’s penchant for telling people (including his own wife) to shut up or chastising them as “stupid” and “numb-nuts” and “dummy.” When he dared to call his devoted promotions and publicity chief an “idiot,” Hope angrily retorted that he must never do that again.
“I call people that all the time,” Ted said with a shrug. “It doesn’t mean anything. You’re one of my best friends. I was nervous. I say all kinds of strange things. I don’t even know what I’m saying sometimes.”
Was that his explanation for his behavior toward women? Pitcher Dick Ruthven outed Ted for making several passes at his wife. (For his part, Ted said he was a “friend” to the Mrs. and that he liked her husband, even if “he was a little bit of a head case.”)
“Nothing stops the guy—even the woman’s husband standing twenty feet away,” professed one Turner watcher. Or his own spouse. Ted’s frequent accomplice, a gorgeous Frenchwoman who liked to lounge naked on the hull of his boat, now enjoyed a new place to sunbathe topless—by the pool during spring training. Never mind if wife Janie was around. When concerned staffers tried to hush their conversation about the nude nymph as Janie approached, she waved their concern away, dismissing the woman as “Ted’s French whore.” At a society party, Ted explained as he left the dinner table, “Excuse me, I have to call my mistress,” while dumbfounded guests watched his scorned wife storm after him and pound on the phone booth door.
Just five months into his tenure, the National League president, Chub Feeney, hauled Ted in. The conduct unbecoming that broke the camel’s back occurred when he shouted out from the stands at pitcher Al Hrabosky that he shouldn’t bother signing his contract. Baseball brass also advised him to stop offering cash incentives to players to win, cease playing poker with them, and ditch the use of nicknames instead of surnames on the backs of jerseys.
This practice had begun when he signed pitcher Andy Messer-smith for an eye-popping salary of a million dollars—heralding the free-agency era that changed the sport forever. The new addition to the team, who happened to wear number 17, quipped, “Boss, the kinda money you’re paying me, my nickname’s gonna be ‘Channel,’ OK?” While Ted loved the idea of his pricey new ballplayer doing double-duty as a human billboard for his beloved television station, Chub Feeney did not. “Channel 17” the ballplayer was exiled to extinction, while channel 17, the formerly downtrodden station on the lunatic fringe, continued to soar.
* * *
The Braves finished the first season of the Turner era with seventy wins and ninety-two losses, cementing their last-place standing. But other vital statistics vastly improved in that summer of 1976. Attendance had almost doubled, in no small part because of the wild entertainment provided to divert from the lousy baseball: wrestling matches, home-plate weddings, postgame fan appreciation spaghetti and pizza served on the field, and, on occasion, Champagne. (A wet T-shirt contest was in the works for next season.) As Hope described it, “Every pig in the southeast was pursued in a greased-pig chase, and every little leaguer appeared in a pre-game show.” No matter how inventive the theatrics, the main draw was indubitably Ted. It was worth coming to the park just to see how he would fare this time, in competitions for mattress stacking, bathtub racing, and the baseball nose-roll (Ted won that contest, and had the bloodied face from pushing the ball around the diamond with his nose to prove it.) He’d almost backed out of the ostrich race (and lamented that it lasted only one lap) after learning that the plan was to ride not on the back of the bird but rather in a cart. That seemed like cheating. Short of hanging upside down at second base or spitting BBs two hundred yards out of his mouth, Ted said, he was happy to participate, parking himself at home plate to shake the hands of victorious home-run hitters, helping the bat girl sweep the bases, or spontaneously breaking into backflips on the field. (That exhibition of superpower even mystified him—he’d never done one before.)
“I may look like a clown,” Ted told an interviewer, “but I’m a very deadly serious person in trying to accomplish things just for the satisfaction of accomplishing them. Struggling hard to achieve something is the most fun I get. All my life is a game. Everything is a game. And the game goes fast, too.”
Time wasn’t all that was fleeting. So was his sense of satisfaction. All he had ever wanted, he said, was to be rich and famous. “Now everybody knows me, and I have more money than I could possibly ever spend, and I’m still not happy.”
His innate restlessness was intensified by his impatience as he continued to wait for the green light to beam his space-age TV station up to the heavens. The earth station was primed and ready in northwest Atlanta. (Bill Tush was pressed into service to host a recorded tour of the highly sequestered high-tech facility that would make the “space-age station” possible.)4
Meanwhile, Ted just couldn’t keep from getting into trouble. Blame this next monumental baseball gaffe on the ’76 World Series—and six vodkas. After rain postponed game four between the New York Yankees and the Cincinnati Reds, a member of the press had tipped Ted off to an impromptu party where the booze flowed. In a blustering move to show he wasn’t a cheapskate, he bragged to the owner of the San Francisco Giants, Bob Lurie, that he’d top whatever offer he made for free-agent outfielder Gary Matthews.
After a sportswriter who’d overheard the exchange wrote about it, and Lurie received a complaint, Ted was slapped with a $10,000 fine for tampering. Sick and tired of the Mouth of the South, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn threatened to suspend him from the sport.
An outraged Ted exclaimed that he hadn’t been suspended from anything since college! Even the aggrieved Lurie felt the punishment didn’t fit the crime. “If all charges and kidding at cocktail parties were taken this seriously,” he said, “there’d be nobody left in the game.”
Irate fans spurred to action on behalf of their good ol’ boy. Burger King printed protest postcards for customers to send to the commissioner’s office. The mayor of Atlanta, Maynard Jackson, delivered a petition filled with forty thousand signatures. A “Ted Turner Task Force” distributed red-and-white bumper stickers, funded by a local tire company, that announced, “WE SUPPORT TED TURNER.” At the Atlanta Flames hockey game, a gigantic sign was unfurled: “Who Cares About Ted Turner? ATLANTA DOES!”
In the outpouring of public support, Ted saw an unbeatable PR opportunity. After all, he said, Jesus Christ “never got rolling till they nailed him to that cross.” Without crucifixion, he “would have been considered just another longhaired hippie freak.” Indeed, a suspension further elevated Ted’s status as a hero—and it was perfectly timed, too. He had other plans for next summer that involved the sport he really cared about. After h
is crushing elimination from the 1974 America’s Cup, he’d plunked down a quarter of a million dollars to buy that year’s winning boat, Courageous, on the condition that he would get to skipper it the next time around, and 1977 was to be the year.
The oldest sports prize in the world, the Cup was considered the most prestigious on the racing circuit—the Mount Everest of sailing. Ted had been dreaming of the chance to participate since his college days, when he’d first laid eyes on the majestic twelve-meter boats in Newport, Rhode Island’s Bannister’s Wharf. To young aspiring warrior Ted, they looked like Viking ships poised for battle.
The three months of preliminary competition took place right smack in the heart of baseball season. How could Teddy Baseball, Mr. Everyman, explain being away for so long? He’d become an indelible part of the Braves draw. Taking off to sail would flush his good ol’ boy persona right down the drain. “People might suddenly realize he was not only rich but also an elitist,” observed Bob Hope. “Or even worse, they would realize yachting came first with him since he’d be missing all the baseball games.”
But if the commissioner suspended him for an entire season . . . then the stadium would be off-limits, and Ted would have the perfect excuse for not being around all summer.
As the verdict loomed, all involved in the business of the sport gathered in Los Angeles for its annual confab, the Winter Meetings. Ted talked to anyone who would listen about how he was being harassed, castigated, and crucified by commissioner Bowie Kuhn—that he was worried for his life and feared Kuhn was going to kill him. “I double locked my door last night,” he told a reporter, and went on to lament that he had “as much chance of winning this case as Czechoslovakia had against Hitler.” At the hotel restaurant, he got down on his hands and knees and ranted and raved and barked like a dog, rambling incoherently in the lobby for a while and then, observed an increasingly concerned Hope, disappearing with some woman.
A few days into the meetings, a radio reporter approached Bob Hope with a troubling audio recording. It was unmistakably Ted, saying that he was going to get a gun and kill the commissioner before the commissioner got him first.
Hope and the team’s general manager, Bill Lucas, took their boss by either arm to a lobby bar.
“Ted, there’s a fine line between being outrageous and being absolutely out of your mind,” they told him. “You’ve gone over the edge.”
“Do you think I should get on a plane and fly back to Atlanta?” Ted asked.
“Yes, if you can’t get your mind together and act right,” Hope responded.
“Do you think I’ve convinced him I’m crazy?” Ted asked. That would certainly cinch his suspension.
Yes, Hope answered. He was convinced himself.
* * *
Just before Christmas, Ted received the gift he’d long been waiting for. The Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for channel 17 to beam its signal to cable operators via the satellite. The switch was flipped on the fortuitous seventeenth day of December. By launching into space, Ted had leapfrogged his once-destined-for-the-graveyard local station into a SuperStation. From the ghetto of the lunatic fringe, all the way up to the stars, and back down to the nation’s television sets.
Though not terribly many of them. To start, only four systems were equipped to receive channel 17—in Grand Island, Nebraska; Newport News, Virginia; Troy, Alabama; and Newton, Kansas. Twenty others, from as far away as Canada, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii, had applied for and received FCC permission to come online by January. Satellite dishes and the right to transmit were tightly monitored by the government. Soon, though, regulators began to ease up on the size of and price of receiving dishes, making it cheaper and easier for even the smallest cable companies to afford to link up to the satellite. In an instant, instead of having to fork over a hundred grand for a thirty-foot dish that ate up the parking lot, you could pay ten thousand bucks for a dish small enough to install on the roof of your building. The more cable operators could offer subscribers, the more subscribers they could attract and the more cable would grow.
By April, channel 17 would have a half million viewers outside the Atlanta area; by the fall of 1977, double that.
To help him wade through this new complex terrain, Ted hired one of the few people in the nation who actually understood it. From his perch at a cable trade association, Donald Andersson had intently studied the rules and the maps of the nation’s systems and television stations. Now, a soldier in Ted’s army, he trundled around the southeast to cable companies large and small, encouraging them to, as the button he took to wearing on his lapel invited, “Steal This Signal.” But this was hardly a theft: It was a game-changing rule that was about to catapult Ted to new figurative heights.
From the ladies in the brothels in Nye County, Nevada, to the captive audience at the Granite State Prison in Oklahoma, the potential to reach a national audience was, for Ted, more electrifying than all the fireworks ignited throughout the bicentennial year.
Doubters persisted. A dubious reporter had wondered who would care to watch channel 17 outside Atlanta. To prove how widespread and devoted the fan base was, Braves announcer Skip Caray read the doubting reporter’s phone number on the air. The surge of calls overloaded and ultimately blew out the telephone exchange.
Now, with this latest development, another reporter asked, “How many people in Alaska are going to want to watch the Braves?” In short order, another answer arrived. To serve as grand marshal of its annual parade, the city of Valdez, Alaska, invited none other than cable television’s very first star, the man who entertained them every night—Bill Tush.
* * *
The verdict on another bit of business that had vexed Ted arrived just after the first of the year. Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn handed down his sentence: a $35,000 fine for tampering and a year’s suspension for “conduct detrimental to baseball.”
This didn’t stop Ted from making a major announcement the very next day. He was buying another dog of a team whose games he already aired. Purchasing basketball’s Atlanta Hawks might have seemed as pointless as “taking over the Confederate Army on the steps of Appomattox Court House,” he said. “Hitler was more likely to get elected President of Israel than the Hawks were to win.” But owning the team, no matter how losing a team it was, was a key pillar in his new dream, to build a sports network. He planned to supply up to sixteen pay cable sporting events a month.
But first, it was time to hit the road in the name of preseason baseball and the annual Winter Caravan. Along with the usual stops—Macon, Columbus, Savannah, Augusta, Valdosta, Rome, Gainesville, Albany, and Dalton—this year’s goodwill tour to press the flesh and peddle season tickets had expanded to include cities where cable had made the team more beloved, like Chattanooga, Nashville, Knoxville, Montgomery, Anniston, Birmingham, Huntsville, and Dothan.
But the most important stop would be first—Plains, Georgia, hometown of Governor Jimmy Carter, just days away from his inauguration as the thirty-ninth president of the United States. Baseball plus the new president’s slice of small-town America equaled the perfect media pit stop.
Everyone, even Ted, angled for a seat on board. The procession grew to include three buses, two station wagons, and an RV—bigger than the caravan had ever been before. Hope worried that his boss would explode with disappointment if the president-elect himself didn’t show up—an amusement, since Ted was an avowed Republican who’d supported President Ford in the election. Without making any promises, Jimmy’s brother, Billy Carter (sporting a shirt that proclaimed he was a “Redneck Lobbyist”), assured Hope not to worry.
It was warm and sunny, after days of rain and cold, when the caravan pulled into town and paused at the appointed location, the Plains Country Club, which turned out to be little more than a beat-up old shack near an abandoned motel. The players and their entourage waited for an hour before a limousine peeled into the parking lot. Jimmy, Rosalynn, and Amy, enjoying their last weekend befo
re taking up residence in the White House, had arrived.
Ted presented the president-elect with a blue Braves warm-up jacket emblazoned with his name and the number 1, the perfect page-one shot for the next day’s news.
“We’re trying to get their minds off their troubles,” Ted said—meaning their lousy record. “You’re doing a good job,” the president-elect said to Ted—one Georgia boy to another.
“This is strong,” Ted responded. “I was there when you announced you were running and I said, ‘He might do it.’”
“You win a World Series,” Carter replied, aware of Ted’s ambitions for the team, “and we’re even.”
In truth, Ted had developed even grander ambitions than a championship. He himself was considering a run for the presidency. Perhaps he’d first have to wet his feet by winning a more junior office, but he was certain he could. The outpouring of support he received during his scuffle with the baseball commissioner convinced him of his mass appeal. He was certain he could count on the support of the press, too. Wouldn’t the media love to see one of their own run for the highest office in the land?
For now, Plains, Georgia, felt like the center of the universe, as a feast of barbecue chicken was served up on paper plates, accompanied by plenty of beer. Later, what seemed like the entire town (population 653) packed the high school stadium. The soon-to-be First Mother, Miss Lillian, arrived around the second inning and cozied up in a lawn chair. Billy Carter pitched to Hank Aaron, and the Plains All-Stars walloped the pros, seventeen to five.
