On a steamy summer night, I had just arrived at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., for a sales pitch I was going to the next day. I was running late for a planning dinner and hadn’t yet tipped the doorman, and so after dropping my luggage on my hotel room bed, I ran downstairs with my suit clinging to me in the humidity. If I had my choice, I’d have ordered takeout and taken a nice shower.
Instead, I was stepping out of the elevator, looking down at my wallet in my left hand while counting the five one-dollar bills in my right hand. I never looked up to even glance at where I was going, which I assumed was an empty hotel lobby and a straight line to the doorman.
Halfway across the open space, I saw some shiny black shoes next to mine, which caused me to hit the brakes immediately and look up for the first time. I was literally nose-to-nose with the owner of those shoes. He was about an inch or two taller than me and looked like someone I knew personally, and so in the tenth of a second it took for me to look up and think that thought, I said, “What’s up?”
He looked at me, unfazed and unbothered, and said, “What’s up?” Hearing his Southern drawl and now maybe two seconds into this interaction, my brain caught up with my eyes. I was violating Ted Turner’s space. As awkwardly as you can imagine, I said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and stepped around him and noticed that not only had I been standing toe-to-toe with Turner, but I had literally gotten in between him and his date Jane Fonda.
Politics aside for a few moments here—both of them looked better in person than any photo I’d ever seen of them. Both were larger than life and dressed to the nines. He in a classic black tuxedo, and she in some sort of form-fitting off-white gown. I’ve heard the term, “You look like a million bucks,” and now I knew what that means. They were a truly striking couple together in this moment, and unbothered by this knucklehead from Pittsburgh who bumped into them.
I haven't thought about that in years, but the news of Turner's passing has had me thinking quite a bit about him. For our purposes here, I’m going to purposely avoid politics because he was more than that. I'll leave that to the obituary writers.
All of that said, I never liked "Hanoi Jane" Fonda at any level, so don’t confuse my compliment regarding her physical presence as anything other than that. Ted Turner, on the other hand, I admired for his business acumen, his brashness, and his humor. If I see a feature article about him, even to this day, I read it in full immediately.
The stories of how he launched CNN were the stuff of cowboy legend. His business philosophy, as he expressed it in interviews, was class-in-session for me. His attitude reminded me of the guys I grew up with in my own neighborhood, which is why, to my surprise, when I ran into him in that hotel lobby, the look in his eye made me think for a fraction of a fraction of a second he was from my old neighborhood.
When he was the ever-present owner of the Atlanta Braves, I watched everything he did from a business perspective. For ten years, the Pittsburgh Pirates were my client for all things business-related. I thought Turner was the model for a baseball owner at that time. So, when I provided PR counsel to the new owner after they bought the ballclub in the mid-nineties, and we started selling their vision of a new ballpark to Pittsburghers, I still remember telling him to get out of the owner’s box and sit in the stands with the fans “like Ted Turner.” The new owner did just that, and it became his trademark.
This little tribute to Turner isn’t so much about him and his many accomplishments as it is about the impact he had on the world around him.
President Donald Trump had some things to say about Turner when he learned that the American icon died at the age of 87 after a 2018 diagnosis of Lewy body dementia.
"Ted Turner, one of the Greats of All Time, just died. He founded CNN, sold it, and was personally devastated by the Deal because the new ownership took CNN, his ‘baby,’ and destroyed it. It became woke, and everything that he is not all about…Regardless, however, one of the Greats of Broadcast History, and a friend of mine. Whenever I needed him, he was there, always willing to fight for a good cause!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
In creating CNN, Turner created cable news. As the owner of the Atlanta Braves, he took his place in history as one of the more colorful and successful Major League Baseball owners. His use of WTBS-TV and its relationship with the Braves was one of the great innovations of sports media. In the process, he turned a local station into what amounted to another cable network. People from across the country suddenly started tuning in regularly to watch Braves baseball.
He bought the MGM film library and built a cable network to air that content. The Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) became one of the most successful cable enterprises during the peak of cable television. He owned the Atlanta Hawks NBA franchise for a time. And in 1977, he won the America’s Cup, sailing a yacht that he named “Courageous.”
His relationship with Fonda, to whom he was married from 1991 to 2001, and some of his other interests made clear he was a major lib, but not of the kind who control the Democrat Party and the left today. In his time, the left had yet to demonize people like him as they do now (and as his ex-wife does now).
At the same time, his era was a time when, in general, we could see past a person’s politics, and he could do the same for others. And so, in that spirit, here are some terrific, non-political quotes from Ted Turner as a reminder of who he was and what we just lost with his passing.
- “You should set goals beyond your reach so you always have something to live for.”
- “Sports is like a war without the killing.”
- “Life is like a B-movie. You don’t want to leave in the middle of it, but you don’t want to see it again.”
- “If I only had a little humility I would be perfect.”
- “If you can get yourself where you’re not afraid of dying, then you can move forward a lot faster.”
- “The biggest thing I’ve learned from losing? Winning’s better.”
- “All my life people have said that I wasn't going to make it.”
- “I lost 80 percent of my wealth and then gave away over half of the rest. So I'm a man of modest means now. But if you budget carefully and watch your expenditures, you can get by on a couple billion dollars.”
- “When our time’s up it’s up. All the money in the world won’t buy you one more day.”
- “I know what I’m having ‘em put on my tombstone. ‘I have nothing more to say.’”
Rest in peace, Ted Turner, an American original.
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