Vicarious Is Not the Word

By John Skow

Nobody objected in 1976, when the new owner of the At lanta Braves, a baseball team above which mediocrity loomed like a mountain crag, climbed aboard an ostrich before one game and galloped around the infield. It couldn't have hurt and it might have helped; if the ostrich could not actually execute the double play, neither could the Braves, and it was always possible that the bird would swallow the ball.

The ostrich disappeared from history, but the owner, the renowned yachtsman and orator Ted Turner, stayed in view. In a gallant gesture, intended to divert the attention of paying customers from the inept foolery of his athletes, he challenged Tug McGraw of the Philadelphia Phillies to a match race in which each of them would push a baseball around the bases with his nose. Turner won, though he lost a good deal of skin from his face when he skidded in the dirt.

Fans began paying their way into the ballpark, if only to see what Turner would do next, but the Braves were still mired in the swamp. After they lost 16 in a row in 1977, Turner furloughed the manager, put on a uniform and supervised the 17th loss himself (to Pittsburgh, 2-1).

Horrified, National League President Chub Feeney ordered Turner to desist for the good of baseball. Turner watched the next game, a victory, from the stands, but a couple of days later he was in uniform again. He took batting practice, and was about to try his hand at strategy once more when a stern telegram arrived from Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. When Turner phoned Kuhn, the exasperated commissioner uttered the single memorable sentence of a career devoted to prudent locution:

"Why can't you be like everybody else?" Turner's answer ("Because I'm in last place") was to the point, although not exactly an airtight defense. At that very moment three other owners were last in their divisions, and only Turner was trying to escape on the back of an ostrich. Since that ignominious year, the Braves have risen to first in the National League's Western Division, and Turner no longer threatens to manage. But in a way that tends to astonish all of the people some of the time, and infuriate some of the people all of the time, he continues to be an utterly original American sportsman. His sacrilege as a team owner is to regard professional sports as if they were games. He has said, in fact, that life it self is a game, and "money is how you keep score," a statement that, given his history, seems to mean that he regards the score very seriously. At any rate, as if Georgia were a rather dull party and he the host obligated to enliven it, he has poured pots of money into the Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, a run-of-the-court pro basketball team.

He helped finance the Chiefs, a sputtering soccer outfit.

On grounds of excruciating boredom, he has stopped short of investing in hockey. He shows up at Braves and Hawks games, chaws tobacco ballplayer-fashion, brays out "Not too shabby!" when something good happens, and has a fine time. What he does not do is play ball vicariously, as many owners surely do, through the heroics of his gladiators. Vicarious is not a word that enters into a discussion of Ted Turner. He was rotten at ball games as a boy, but he was a fine shot, and in the South this counts for something. (He shot ducks with Fidel Castro in February, and he reported that Castro, whom he urged to bring about a U.S.-Soviet rapprochement, was skilled but somewhat cautious as a hunter.) And he was a sailor. As a boy in Savannah he skittered about in a racing dinghy called a Penguin, earning the nickname Turnover Ted for the amount of time he spent capsized in his first season. He learned as he capsized, and in his third and fourth racing seasons he placed second in his club championships. At Brown University he was unbeaten in dinghy races, and he commodored the sailing team. He went on to win national titles in three classes of round-the-buoys sailing: Y-Flyer, Flying Dutchman and 5.5-meter.

Small-boat sailing at that level is a matter of constant, intuitive adjustment, and it was this habit of clawing at tiny advantages, as well as guts and a gift for inflating calms and shouting down storms with nonstop harangue, that Turner brought to deep-water racing. He flogged his crews with despicable insults, and they responded with loyalty. Biographer Roger Vaughan, in The Grand Gesture, used the phrases "constant creative tension" and "dangerously mounting hysteria" (take your pick) in describing Turner as a leader of men. But Captain Outrageous, as the press began calling him, won his share of the world's big races, including the arduous Southern Ocean Racing Circuit competition in 1966 and 1970. In 1974, sailing Mariner unsuccessfully in the America's Cup trials, he affronted the stuffy New York Yacht Club by remarking that if the South had won the Civil War, he would have been a Confederate challenger, not a U.S. defender.

In 1977 he did defend the America's Cup successfully, in Courageous. Two years later he won the stormy Fastnet race, off the coast of England. Fifteen

yachtsmen drowned, and Turner brushed away the danger with, "Sailing in rough weather is what the sport is all about." Of the loss of life, he said only: "It's no use crying. The king is dead. Long live the king."

In 1980 he was beaten in the Cup trials, and Rival Dennis Conner made the Cup defense. Said Turner, after a summer of frenzied effort burned away with the morning haze, "It's great to win and it's not as much fun to lose, but it's not that big a deal." The man who at that point had just started the Cable News Network added: "Christ, this is a sailboat race." Last year he retired from ocean racing, and now messes about with his 16-year-old son Rhett, each Turner alternating as skipper, in local Hobie Cat competition.

On a Jeep ride around Hope, his 5,000-acre plantation south of Charleston, S.C., he identifies an indigo bunting and spots a pair of wild turkey hens. "I've got two baby bison, and one of them was born last week," he says happily, "... and baby geese, baby turkeys, plus I have two bears and there's alligators, and we're raising all kinds of ducks. I'm making a garden of Eden. It's amazing how tame things will get when you're not trying to kill them. Countries should act the same." For the moment, in this private place, Captain Outrageous, also known as the Mouth of the South, has become Peaceable Ted. Naturally, he takes his peace the way he fought his competition, in luxuriant excess. --By John Skow

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