Nobody Ever Had More Fun at a Press Conference Than Ted Turner

I can’t really add much to the Ted Turner obit that Erik Loomis has posted over on LGM. He gets the good—TCM, daily baseball and sports on television, land preservation in the American West, bison burgers. He also gets the bad—CNN, Turner’s extremely dodgy personality, his failures as the owner of the Atlanta Braves—and all of them correctly. Turner wasn’t around much during my sportswriting days, Boston being an American League town while he was bungling around as the owner of Boston’s historic National League nine. What I do remember is the now-legendary press conference held after Turner’s Courageous successfully defended the America’s Cup in 1977.

There is a considerable interval between the end of the last race and the arrival of the winning boat at the dock. Often, the crew of the winning boat uses this time to drink like, well, drunken sailors. (In 1983, when Australia II finally took the cup away from this country, the crew arrived at the dock swinging from various parts of the rigging and singing Men at Work’s “Down Under” at top volume.) But no sailor ever came home from the sea more hammered than Ted Turner did in 1977. If I remember correctly, he was swigging from a bottle of rum—yo, ho, ho—that people kept hiding under the table when he wasn’t looking. Turner would then disappear under the table to fetch his jug.

The man is still a legend in Newport. Nobody ever had more fun at a press conference. When I think of Ted Turner, I am reminded of what my friend George Reedy once wrote about Lyndon Johnson—he was a son of a bitch, but he was a colossal son of a bitch.

R.I.P.