I appreciate all the nice things that have been said and written about Ted Turner and his remarkable life — TV mogul, philanthropist, owner of teams, land owner, Captain Outrageous.
He led a storybook life worthy of being recognized as an icon and historic figure. However, the Ted Turner I first knew and worked for wasn’t known by his next door neighbor, much less being famous. And many of the people who knew him weren’t too sure what he was. He would occasionally say he was motivated by a speech made by the president at Brown University on his first day of class. He told the students the only ones he would remember would be the top 3% of the class and the bottom 3%, Figuring he couldn’t make the top, he set his goal for the bottom. Not only was he kicked out of school, he achieved his goal. He is remembered.
I remember vividly the first time I really met Turner. I had been around him a few times in the early 1970s when his billboard company helped us promote Hank Aaron’s chase to break the home run record held by Babe Ruth. I think he knew my name, but I wasn’t sure. He wasn’t someone known in the business community, much less considered a business or civic leader.
I was the public relations director of the Atlanta Braves, a job I got when I was 24 years old. Channel 17, a tiny UHF television station in Atlanta, had bought the television rights from highly respected WSB-TV, Channel 2, to televise Braves games.
That seemed somewhat crazy and, to some, it was ridiculous. Many of us had never watched Channel 17, which had just changed its call letters from WJRJ to WTCG (“watch this channel grow”). For most of us, it was virtually impossible to pick up the signal of a UHF station; you had to spin a dial on your TV set and hope it landed on a most-often fuzzy picture, and you needed a special round antenna alongside the normal TV antenna on the roof of your house or on top of your TV set.
Channel 17 was going to televise 60 Braves games — three times the number of WSB — which was the maximum the top minds in baseball believed could be televised without saturating the market. There was a lot of doubt as to how the new TV partner would work out.
Our first meeting with him as our TV partner was unforgettable. He told us Channel 17 didn’t have ratings or sales presentations — that good sales people didn’t need those; they were crutches for those who couldn’t sell. He stood in his chair and sang “You gotta have heart,” the song from the Broadway show “Damn Yankees” about the hapless Washington Senators.
We left with our heads spinning. We didn’t know what we had gotten into. However, over the next two years, I worked alongside Ted and his remarkably good sales team, helping them sell TV time for a team that wasn’t very good. I learned to appreciate his eccentricities, but I was regularly facing people who just didn’t know what to think of this brash young television station owner. He was loud at social events and sometimes crass. In fact, one night we were at a reception when my wife, Susan, told Ted, “If you weren’t rich, you’d be just another drunk at a fraternity party.” From then on, the only person I ever knew whom Ted feared was Susan.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
I soon learned to enjoy working with Ted, but I couldn’t imagine actually working for him. But that time came in 1976, when he bought the Braves. He wasn’t poor, but he wasn’t really rich, either. He couldn’t afford the $10 million price tag to buy the team. However, the Chicago group of owners gave him a deal. The Braves had $2 million in the bank, and they set up a payment schedule like buying a house. His father-in-law, from Birmingham, Alabama, helped him out financially. Nobody in baseball or even Braves fans in Atlanta knew Ted Turner. However, they found out in a hurry.
I came as part of the team. I had just been through the media scrutiny of Hank Aaron’s home run chase with as any as 400 media traveling with the team. I hadn’t thought about it, but I knew almost everyone in the national media. Aaron wasn’t just a sports story; it was a societal story during the time of the Civil Rights Movement.
Tom Brokaw, for instance, traveled with the team. I pretty much knew them all. Ted called me into his office and gave me his initial order.
“You know everyone in the media. Make me famous.” So we had our mission and got started.
The next few years I lived at full throttle alongside Ted as his publicist and promoter. It was dog years of education.
You are allotted only one or two true characters to know in your lifetime. I was privileged to work alongside the biggest character of our time — a character who truly became bigger than life.
First, he was a great boss. He drove me hard but made me feel special, made me feel I could do things exceptional. He would tell me I had the magic touch. At first, I thought that was silly, but after a while, I looked at my fingers and thought, “Maybe I do.”
He had a remarkable leadership style that inspired ordinary people to do remarkable things. He made me think I was a great publicist and promoter, and there was never a time when I doubted he believed I was.
Initially, our thinking was to do whatever was needed to get famous, and once famous, we’d worry about what people thought of him. After all, it is better to go down the street as the village idiot and be noticed than to not be noticed at all. We were crazy, and we promoted like crazy.
He didn’t have much money to pay for a good team on the field or marketing the team. We promoted and promoted — wire walkers across the top of the stadium, ostrich races, over a dozen couples getting married on the field before a game, some promotions too embarrassing to note. We had some kind of special promotion every game.
He told me why he wanted to be famous. “If you are famous, the world comes to you.”
His bravado was endearing. He was going to be “Alexander the Great,” taking over the world through communications.
He told me how to lead my life. “Do what makes you happy. You won’t miss any meals and will always have a roof over your head.”
There’s good crazy and bad crazy, and no doubt Ted was a tad crazy. One morning he called me at 5 a.m. and told me to come to his office. I had no idea what to expect. I walked in, and he was disheveled and sitting at his desk, looking like he had been there all night. He told me to sit down, and said, “You think I’m crazy.” He said he wasn’t mad — he just knew I knew he was, and he wanted to tell me the challenges he’d had in his life that haunted him, ranging from being put in boarding school as a 5-year-old, (“Nobody sends a child to boarding school at age 5″) to his sister dying of lupus, to his dad committing suicide. “I just wanted you to know.”
I was at dinner with him when we came up with the idea for CNN. I remember he wanted to have a direct-to-cable broadcast signal, partly to avoid scrutiny of the FCC and as a next big thing to do. We talked about maybe doing a sports channel (before ESPN) but concluded there weren’t enough sports events, talked about music (before MTV) but, to quote Ted, “Nobody’s going to watch music on TV,” and settled on news partially because WGST Radio had just become Atlanta’s first news station.
Ted said he didn’t like news because it made people feel bad and people wouldn’t sit at home and watch three hours of news at night. WGST’s theme was “Tune in, tune out, news whenever you want it.” It was the 6 o’clock news over and over again, available whenever you want to watch. After a little more conversation, Ted jumped up and said, “Let’s do news.” Over the next few weeks you might have thought he was Walter Cronkite. News was his next adventure.
Sometimes I wonder why I decided to leave working for him. I was involved with the Braves and Hawks, as well as TV. I worked directly for Ted. There was much to like. However, we had no idea where things were going, whether we could stay in business. I was working day and night. My friend Bill Lucas, who was general manager of the Braves, had just died at age 42 of a stroke, which was devastating. Also, he wanted me to work in TV and I wanted to work in baseball. He put me on the board of the Braves for the next decade just so I could be involved.
Those who stayed did very, very well. Those years with Ted Turner shaped a wonderful life for me and my family. There is still much of him in me.
Bob Hope is former public relations director of the Atlanta Braves. He also was Ted Turner’s original publicist and promoter and served as a member of the Atlanta Braves board. He is currently chairman of Hope Beckham Espinosa.
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