Ted Turner appreciation: Once you met him, you never forgot him

I first met Ted Turner in 1982 as a young reporter, fully aware of the fearsome reputation, but also fully unprepared for it. In his office above the CNN campus in Atlanta, with those monumental, world-changing satellite dishes as backdrop, he pulled out a Japanese samurai sword — some bauble he'd picked up on his travels — which he then began swinging side to side. As Captain Outrageous drew closer, the sword drew closer too. The swinging intensified, and soon that sword was flashing before my eyes — my life flashing by as well.

There are things you remember, along with the people you associate with them. Unsurprisingly, this near-death experience endures — a typical theatrical flourish that he'd doubtless repeated many other times, as both performance art and insurance that the startled witness never would forget. As he was with so much else — America's Cup champion, World Series winner, philanthropist, land baron, TV industry maverick, and perhaps most famously, as Jane Fonda's husband — Ted Turner was particularly good at forging memories.

One reason is that he was so good at ignoring limitations, mostly his own. When he put a satellite dish on top of his ramshackle Atlanta TV station — presto! — he had a national network, or at least convinced a large number of initially skeptical advertisers that it was a rough approximation of one. After launching CNN in 1980, the inevitable mockery arrived (24 hours of news? seriously?), which was then soon followed by the revolution.

He nearly killed the whole company off in the mid-1980s when he bought a presumed dog from Kirk Kerkorian — the MGM library. But as he had learned with the Atlanta baseball team — to paraphrase that old political line — for Turner, it was all about the programming, stupid, or the stuff you put between the commercials. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) endures to this day, arguably the most beloved franchise on all of cable TV.

Most remarkably, he launched a hostile bid to buy CBS in 1985 for $5.2 billion in junk bonds, no cash. Few had ever heard of this thing called a "junk bond," but soon enough everyone would. Absolutely no one thought something like a TV network could be bought like it was wrapped fish. Soon enough everyone would find out otherwise. CBS bought back a huge chunk of itself to fend off the attack, while even another legend, the octogenarian William Paley, returned to challenge the upstart from Georgia. To no avail. The mighty Tiffany network saved itself from the Mouth of the South but subsequently buckled, then crumbled. Soon enough, it was swallowed by another hostile bidder, Laurence Tisch,  while NBC and ABC would soon change ownership too. Turner had just schooled a hidebound world that nothing was sacrosanct — certainly not TV networks.

Over the years, Turner provided great theater simply because he couldn't help himself. He challenged TV's other great change agent, Rupert Murdoch, to a duel, or was it a boxing match? (For Turner, did the distinction much matter anyway?) The match never happened, but Turner did promise "to squash" Murdoch "like a bug." The bug-squashing never happened either, or at least not as intended. Fox News, which launched in 1996, surpassed CNN in total U.S. viewership in 2002, and never looked back. Meanwhile, Turner proved that you never really should pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel. Murdoch's New York Post eviscerated his rival on a daily basis ("Is Ted Turner Nuts? You Decide!" read one headline of many). The insults stuck.

But did any of this matter much by that point? Turner had sold out to Warner Bros. in 1995. He'd moved on to other things, or in his grandiose estimation even bigger things (and to other places, specifically Montana; Turner was then and remained one of the nation's biggest landowners, along with his most important ally, cable titan John Malone).

I sometimes wonder what would have happened all those years ago if Ted had accidentally chopped off my head. Sure, an unhappy fate for a lowly reporter (but — again — certainly a memorable one.) Would this swashbuckling, sword-swinging, rule-breaking genius have gone on to change cable, then the rest of television and pop culture?

Would television have become better, and richer, and more diverse — as it undeniably has become in the years and decades since, in large measure thanks to him?

I'm not so sure it would have. Therefore, just to set the record straight, I'm eternally grateful that he did not.