Ted Turner: The Mouth of the South

If not for Ted Turner, the Atlanta Braves likely would have relocated to Toronto. If not for the Braves, Ted Turner likely would never have become the iconic media mogul that confounds and inspires to this day.

No Braves. No CNN. No “Mouth of the South.”

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AJC file photo

In a 1977 publicity stunt, Dave Bristol milked a cow on the field.

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AJC file photo

Ted Turner (left) managed the Braves for one game in 1977. Pitching coach Johnny Sain is at right.

THAT SEVENTIES CITY:

• Introduction
• Politics: A big change was coming
• The Mouth of the South
• MARTA: A train to greatness
• The hottest spots were Underground
• City quickly became a destination
• Riverbend a decade-long party
• Timeline of the decade

• Photos: Scenes | Politics | People
• YOUR TURN: Send us your '70s photos! | Tell us what you remember — or don't remember — about the 1970s in Atlanta?

Complete coverage

Fortunately for Atlanta, time, place and personality converged at just the right moment.

Before he bought the team in 1976, Turner was well-known locally — having turned around his father’s struggling billboard company and a little-watched UHF television station — but he wasn’t famous.

“Ted was a lot like Atlanta at the time,” said Bob Hope, Braves marketing and promotions guru for much of the 1970s and author of the book recalling his years working for Turner, “We Could’ve Finished Last Without You.”

“He had a desire to be much more than he was,” Hope said.

The Braves weren’t much more than pitiful back then.

Franchise icon Hank Aaron had been traded to Milwaukee a year earlier. Only 534,672 people — about one-fifth the team’s 2008 attendance — turned out to watch the Braves finish 40 games out of first place in 1975.

The team’s Chicago-based owners were anxious to sell, and a group of investors wanting to buy the Braves and move them to Toronto emerged as serious bidders.

“No one much cared if the Braves left town,” Hope said. “Baseball was not really ingrained in the culture down here.”

Turner himself wasn’t much of a fan; baseball was secondary to his ambitions. He had a relationship with the team’s owners through his UHF station, WTCG (later WTBS), which carried Braves games locally. Hoping to avoid yet another franchise relocation, the Chicago group cut Turner a deal. For $10 million.

That’s roughly $440 million below the team’s current value.

After the purchase, Turner told People magazine he planned to keep a low profile as team owner. “I don’t want to shoot my mouth off a lot,” he said.

At an introductory banquet for the new team owner by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, Turner appeared intoxicated, said Hope, who was in the audience. At one point during his rambling speech, Turner noted how the candles on one side of the room were burning faster than those on the other.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for him,” Hope recalled. “I thought he was crazy.”

Only a little. Both were proud hustlers, and the 37-year-old owner set his 28-year-old PR guru loose.

With little promise between the lines, Hope had to be creative to draw fans into the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. Some of his more memorable gimmicks to spike attendance (it nearly doubled the first year Turner owned the team):

• Wedlock and Headlock Night. Thirty-four couples were married before the game, and a wrestling match was held afterward.

• A mattress-stacking contest.

• The world’s biggest bowl of ice cream. It almost killed an Atlanta radio deejay participating in the stunt.

“He dived into the bowl and he couldn’t get out,” Hope said. Now you know: humans can’t float in ice cream.

In 1980, Hope, the Barnum of Capital Avenue left the Braves after a falling out with Turner.

“We were of our time, but you only do that kind of thing for so long,” he said.

That year, looking to expand the broadcasting empire built in part by the Braves’ success on superstation WTBS, Turner launched the Cable News Network — CNN.

Today, the former college dropout is America’s largest private landowner, with a net worth exceeding $2 billion, according to Forbes magazine.

“Ted didn’t believe anything was impossible,” Hope said, “and that’s what made him such a success.”

Ted Turner in the ’70s

• 1970: Turner buys struggling UHF television station WJRJ, which had lost $800,000 the previous year. He renames station WTCG, for “Watch This Channel Grow.”
• 1972: WTCG, using microwave transmission and relays, sends its signal to cable television operators.
• 1974: WTCG begins broadcasting Atlanta Braves baseball.
• 1975: Turner rents a channel on RCA’s SATCOM II communications satellite, which beams the channel to cable television stations throughout the U.S.
• 1976: Turner buys the Braves for $10 million (other sources have figure at $12 million).
• 1976: WTCG rechristened “The Superstation,” reaches nearly 2 million cable TV subscribers.
• 1977: Turner purchases controlling interest in the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.
• 1977: Turner defends the America’s Cup for the United States as skipper of the yacht Courageous.
• 1977: Turner manages the Atlanta Braves for one game, a loss, the team’s 17th in a row. He’s ordered out of the dugout by baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and the Braves break their losing streak the next day.
• 1979: WTCG is renamed WTBS, for Turner Broadcasting System.

Sources: Baseball Chronology; AJC archives; “Days in the Life of Atlanta,” by Norman Shavin; “It Ain’t as Easy as it Looks,” by Porter Bibb; Baseball Almanac; the New York Times.