Ted Turner

from a Playboy interview with Ted Turner, which I find here.

PLAYBOY: You go to every home game and sit in the front row. Why don’t you sit in the upper deck in the owner’s air-conditioned box?
TURNER: That’s what’s wrong! I told you, you idiot! All the owners sit up there behind their bulletproof glass and they’re afraid to meet the fans. I sit down front and I have to give about three dozen autographs during every game. Anyway, I figure the best seats are in the front row. The first thing I did was spend $1,000,000 on a giant TV screen over the scoreboard, then I spent $500,000 moving the dugouts and front rows closer. What I really love is catching foul balls and throwing them back in. Caught one the first day after I got back from winning the America’s Cup. Not too shabby!

PLAYBOY: We notice that some of the Braves grew mustaches and beards. You have no objection to that?
TURNER: Hell, you’ve got a beard and I’ve got a mustache. I don’t care what a ballplayer does, if it makes him happy, it makes me happy. Just as long as he wears something over his cock, you know.

More:

PLAYBOY: Considering the fact that you got interested in baseball just two years ago, how can you stand to be around it so much?
TURNER: It’s like anything, my friend; no matter what you’re doing, if your attitude’s right, you’re going to enjoy it. I mean, when I was in the Coast Guard cleaning latrines, I whistled while I was cleaning them. I didn’t even question it. “Mine is not to question why, mine is but to do or die.”
PLAYBOY: Do you think about your past a lot?
TURNER: Yeah, I always wonder why people did things. When you think back, when men look back, the happiest times of their lives were when they got together and did something. We are social animals. The most fun that you ever have as a man is in doing men’s things. Men’s things are primarily getting a bunch of guys together and going out and conquering a country, fighting a war, winning a big fight, putting a baseball team together. For most guys, the happiest times were when they were on the football team, when they won the Ivy League championship or the state championship or the debate team or the bridge team or whatever it was. But first of all, you got to get a good bunch of guys together and do it, whatever it is. And then you have to get them all excited and motivated so they’ll bust their ass. People have the most fun when they’re busting their ass.

More:

PLAYBOY: You still love history?
TURNER: Yeah, mostly military history. As much as I hate war now, I was basically a warrior. I was reading about war all the time as a kid. Fighting and soldiers and all that stuff. What I wanted to be was Horatio, Admiral Nelson, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Pericles; they were the greatest warriors.
PLAYBOY: Why did you like it so much?
TURNER: In the past, war was a lot of fun. You know, rape and plunder, kill and steal. There weren’t enough women to go around, because they died early, so you grabbed the other guy’s women, sold his children into slavery and killed the soldiers. Used to go home and have a big parade. Glorious, you know. Now war is finished.
PLAYBOY: What do you mean?
TURNER: It’s no longer fun. The weapons are too sophisticated. It’s not men leading the fleet into battle or running up the flags, you know. Back in the old days, when they didn’t have professional sporting events, war was sport, like gladiators killing each other. You know who was the original rookie of the year? David, when he went out against Goliath.

(Similar thought from Bruce Catton). More:

PLAYBOY: How much money do you need to stay happy?
TURNER: Not much. Just give me an old 12-meter sailboat and a couple of movie starlets, a house in the suburbs and a television station and I can get by on one sirloin strip at a time, or a two-and-a-quarter-pound lobster, plus a couple hundred thou in the bank.
PLAYBOY: Sounds like wealth is the way to joy, then.
TURNER: I’ve seen very, very poor people who were happy and very, very wealthy people who were miserable. I mean, you have to realize how lucky you are that you weren’t born a mosquito. Not to mention people–a black guy wonders, Why wasn’t I born white? Or a guy from India says, Why wasn’t I born an American? But you’re still better off than a mosquito, ’cause it lives only one summer and gets swatted at every time it gets a bite to eat.
PLAYBOY: You turn out to be quite a philosopher.
TURNER: Well, at least I know the meaning of life.
PLAYBOY: We’re waiting.
TURNER: Man is put on earth for one reason alone, and that’s to reproduce. As soon as we do, we start dying. Life is one great big endless circle. You know that song, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here”? Who was the wisest man ever? Socrates, right? He said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Which is pretty heavy. It’s a shattering thought.

Without Ted Turner there’d be no Cartoon Network, no Adult Swim, no Common Side Effects? An effect Ted Turner had on my life: because the residue of his cable empire is still HQ’d there, we’ve made several visits to Atlanta. It coulda been Dallas or Phoenix or something. The rise of Ted Turner, is it connected to the overall rise of Georgia that came with the Jimmy Carter governorship? The two were friends:

“I was a regular fishing companion with Ted, and he and I were both fishing for bass, and he had told me that he had just heard that Jane Fonda was going to get a divorce from her husband. And he was thinking about asking her for a date,” friend and former President Jimmy Carter told CNN in a previous interview.

(sources, I can’t find the original CNN interview transcribed.)