Breaking the rules of TV, baseball and monogamy: Inside the wild and woolly life of CNN founder Ted Turner
The Mouth of the South has gone silent.Ted Turner, the man who founded CNN — the first 24-hour news channel — in 1980, died Wednesday at age 87, of complications related to Lewy body dementia.Few billionaires knew how to have as much fun with money, be it buying up more land than anyone else in the US, winning America’s Cup or purchasing his hometown baseball team, the Atlanta Braves, and treating himself to a front-row seat — singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and storming the turf as players crossed home plate.Sometimes, his ego was his own worst enemy.Turner was only a year into his two-decade ownership of the Braves in 1977 when he got so fed up with their 16-game losing streak that he told the team’s manager he was fired for two weeks — and took matters into his own hands.“Ted said, ‘I could do a better job managing the team,’ put on a uniform and went down to manage them,” Greg Hughes, formerly the head of communications for Turner Sports and now executive VP of communications for NBC Sports, told The Post.Not that Turner knew what he was doing.Phil Niekro, a Hall of Famer who pitched for the Braves for 19 years, recalled to ESPN in 2013 how he jokingly asked Turner, “‘Ted, what spot you got me hitting in today?’ And he said, ‘Hell, I don’t know.
You want to lead off? You want to hit second or third? We just lost 16 in a row.You’ve been around here long enough.
Hit wherever you want to.’“I said, ‘I don’t think that’s going to work, Ted.Put me in that ninth spot.'”It only got worse from there, with the team adding a 17th loss, beaten by the Pirates 2-1.
But Turner still made history.“The rules of baseball had to be quickly changed,” said Terry McGuirk, who began working with Turner at the age of 21 and is now chairman of the Atlanta Braves, told The Post.After that, anyone who owned stock in a team was forbidden to manage it.“If I’m smart enough to save $11 million to buy the team, I ought to be sm...