Ted Turner is the only person besides Connie Mack to own and manage a major-league baseball team. His solitary game as a big-league manager (a loss) was seven days before I sat in his office — just the two of us — in 1977.
A couple of months later he won the America’s Cup. Less than a year later he launched plans for the Cable News Network…CNN. Yet on this day in May, the Atlanta Braves owner made time for a baseball writer who described him this way: “If he sits, it is only for an instant. If he stops talking, it’s but for a moment. The voice is excitable, sometimes abrasive. The eyes are curious, sometimes distant.”
Turner smiled tightly.
“Well,” he said, “what did you expect? A raving maniac? Is there blood dripping from my incisors when I smile?”
He was already known as The Mouth of the South and if there’s one thing he never did, it’s disappoint reporters. The previous week, with his Braves on a 17-game losing streak, he sent manager Dave Bristol on a 10-day vacation. After Turner’s managerial debut, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ruled his contract invalid.
Six days later, Turner said:
“I have the distinction of being the only manager who had his contract voided because the man whose name was on the contract [his] was not considered competent. What if I appointed the village idiot to do it? That would have been approved.
“What are the qualifications to be a big-league manager? Nobody asked about my qualifications when I was approved as owner, and as the owner you make all final decisions. If the publisher of The Montreal Star decides he wants to go on the baseball beat, you’re gone.”
Turner was 38 then. He would soon be off to bigger things. Now suffering from dementia, Turner’s rise (and fall) is well-documented, but he showed the world he cared deeply about people, about the bison he bequeathed a home in Montana, about the planet and about how it all came within a whisker of not happening. In his book, Call Me Ted, years later I read that in college he drove a Plymouth Fury through an unmarked railway crossing at 100 mph just before a train he didn’t see: “We missed each other by a flash of a second.”
If they hadn’t, I would have missed out on that interview. And the world would have missed out on Ted Turner.
