THAT ’70s CITY / A look at the decade when Atlanta came of age: A Brave(s) new world for Turner

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 who confounds and inspires to this day.

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

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 DJ 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, the Barnum of Capitol 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.”