Call Me Ted (28 page)
When we dissolved the Better World Society after six years of operations, I remember gritting my teeth and thinking to myself that the next time I do something like this, I’ll have made enough of my own money that I won’t have to be a fund-raiser. In the meantime, there was plenty of work to do if I was ever going to make that happen.
The Goodwill Games
I
made my first trip to the Soviet Union early in 1984. I wanted CNN to become a global business and after my Cuba trip, I was hopeful that we could do business in the Soviet Union. When the driver who picked up our group at the Moscow airport drove us by a beautiful new facility, he explained, sadly, that it had been built specifically for the 1980 Olympics, the Games that had been boycotted by the United States in protest of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. Throughout our visit it seemed like everywhere we went there was another reminder of those Olympics and the more I saw, the sadder I was that our athletes had not been able to participate. Adding to my disappointment was the fact that the Soviets were thinking about retaliating by staying home during the 1984 Olympics later that summer in Los Angeles.
The situation was depressing. There was already so much distrust and so little communication between our two countries, and now both sides were deciding that they couldn’t join each other and the rest of the world for an athletic competition. My first exposure to people from other countries was through sailing, and it occurred to me that elite athletes have more opportunities to associate with their peers from around the globe than just about anyone. When they do, despite the competition they usually get along. It’s easy to hate people you don’t know, but it’s hard to hate people once you get to know them and recognize how much you have in common. The Russian people were more like us than they were different—they loved their families, they had pets, they enjoyed ballet and classical music, and they liked having a drink of vodka with their friends. This isn’t to say that our political differences weren’t significant—they were—but I felt that we’d never bridge these differences by simply shutting down communication and avoiding international gatherings like the Olympics.
After the Soviets made it official that they would retaliate with their boycott of the Los Angeles Games, I had an idea. Why not create a competition outside the Olympics that would allow American and Soviet athletes to compete? By 1986, it would be ten years since summer athletes from the two superpowers had competed head-to-head and I felt they would be eager for the opportunity. By this time, I had hired Bob Wussler from CBS, where he’d had experience producing large-scale sporting events for television. When I explained to Bob my idea, he grasped it immediately, and since he knew that I wanted this event to help bring our two countries closer together, we decided to call them the Goodwill Games. We loved this name, and though the original idea was to restrict the competition just to the United States and the Soviet Union, as we thought about it, we decided to make these games as much like the Olympics as possible and to extend invitations to the best athletes from all over the world. Soviet officials embraced the idea and agreed to host the games in Moscow. We were off and running on another new and massive undertaking.
To make it work, we had to convince the various countries to send their teams, and at first the U.S. federations struggled with their decision. Their athletes were eager to participate and it became almost impossible for them to say no. For sports that don’t have professional leagues (like track and field and gymnastics) the Olympic Games were the pinnacle, and since the boycotts had kept these athletes on the sidelines, they were eager to go to Moscow. Once the U.S. federations agreed to send teams to a Soviet-hosted event, the other countries followed. (We did have one disappointment. Just prior to the games Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger told the handful of American athletes who were members of the U.S. military that they would not be allowed to participate.) The games would be held in the summer of ’86 and we would televise them on TBS SuperStation. We negotiated deals with overseas networks to help us extend our reach and sell more advertising. To differentiate the Goodwill Games from the Olympics, we did away with preliminary heats wherever possible, making more of the competitions a final contest for the medal. I didn’t get involved in the planning of athletic competitions other than making sure that yachting was included, as I never would have been able to live it down in the sailing community if it hadn’t been! Ultimately, more than three thousand athletes from seventy-nine countries competed in eighteen different sports.
It was a couple of days before the Goodwill Games began that I first met Mikhail Gorbachev. Georgi Arbatov, my friend from the Better World Society board, set up the meeting and it was very heartening. Gorbachev expressed his hope that American leadership would focus on building an environment where our young people would be able to grow up to be friendly, cooperative, and more tolerant of other countries’ political systems. He said it was time to put the arms race behind us and to move on to spend our time and energy more productively. I encouraged him to be patient with us because we had a military-industrial complex with a vested interest in continuing the arms race and a free, privately owned media that also operates in its own best interest. I told him that while President Reagan might be inclined, it would be difficult for him to take the lead in de-escalating the arms race and that he—Gorbachev—was in a much better position to make the first moves. By doing that, Gorbachev might get the ball rolling, bring an end to the Cold War, and maybe even win the Nobel Peace Prize in the process. It was a terrific meeting that would mark the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
Going to Moscow also gave me a chance to see my oldest son, Teddy. When he graduated from The Citadel the previous summer I encouraged him to consider working at the CNN bureau in Moscow.
A TED STORY
“A Great Experience”
—Teddy Turner
Dad was always very plain with all of us: “After graduation you have two weeks and your stuff better be out of my house.” He was never into handouts. When I was in college I had a $25 a week allowance and I was traveling all over the country with The Citadel sailing team on an annual budget of less than $1,500. I learned how to live very frugally, thanks to Dad.
When I came home for Christmas my senior year he asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “Well, I guess I’d like to come work for you.” That’s what I had always done. In addition to helping out with his sailing crew, when I was twelve I was one of the last family members to work for the outdoor advertising company before it was sold, and later I had summer jobs at CNN.
He said, “What area of the business would you like to work in?”
I told him I’d enjoyed my summers at CNN and thought that was really where the future of the company was going to be. When he asked me what kind of work I wanted to do, I said, “Well, I’m not an in-the-front-of-the-camera guy. I’ve got a great face for radio so I’d rather work behind the camera or in the studio.” Dad thought that sounded great but when he asked me where I wanted to be located, it threw me for a loop because I’d always assumed it would be Atlanta. He explained that we really only packaged the news in Atlanta; it wasn’t really “made” there. “There are only two places in the world at this time where real news is made,” he said, “and that’s Washington, D.C., and Moscow. As far as politics and the shape of world power go, those are the two cities.”
I had never thought about it like that and since I figured I could go to D.C. anytime, I decided that Moscow would be a lot more interesting. So when I went back to school I tried to take Russian; they did have a small Russian department at The Citadel, but you couldn’t take 101 in the second semester, so right after I graduated I moved to D.C. and took three months of intensive language study there.
Gorbachev came into power the spring of 1985 and when I got to Moscow in September of 1985 the words “perestroika” and “glasnost” hadn’t really come out yet. The timing couldn’t have been better. I went to Afghanistan a couple times as the war there was winding down. Chernobyl blew up while I was in Russia so I went to Kiev a lot. We went down to a Soviet nuclear test site because there were big test ban things going on, and I was there in Moscow for the first Goodwill Games. It was a great experience and I really was able to do some pretty amazing things
By the time the Goodwill Games began, it was clear that they would not be a financial success, but seeing the athletes come together from around the globe I was convinced we were doing something worthwhile. The Soviet organizers put a lot of effort into the opening ceremonies and they were beautiful and moving. And Gorbachev’s decision to attend in person added a lot of weight and credibility to the event. There were also many special moments throughout the competition. At the close of the swimming events, the American co-captains—one man and one woman—gave gifts to their Soviet counterparts and spoke brief words of peace that were translated into Russian over the loudspeakers. When I looked around the arena I didn’t see a dry eye. Whenever medals were handed out to Americans or Soviets it was remarkable to see athletes from these two rival nations standing at attention and showing respect while the other country’s national anthem was played. At the rowing venue, the Soviet army band of about one hundred musicians played the anthems live. Given the troubled state of our relations at the time, seeing and hearing them play “The Star-Spangled Banner” was incredible. At one point, after the eight-oared shells competition, four Soviets got into the American boat and four from the U.S. team got into the Soviet boat and they rowed back and forth together.
At the closing ceremonies, I was given an opportunity to address the crowd and the audience watching on Soviet television. The games were heavily viewed in the Soviet Union and I believe that about a third of their television households were tuned in that night. Given the tenor of the times, it was pretty surprising that they would let me address such a mass audience live—for all they knew I could have grabbed the mike and said, “Down with communism!” but they let me go on without even asking what I had planned to say. I used the opportunity to thank our gracious hosts and to express my hope that these events might have helped advance the cause of peace around the world. The Goodwill Games really did live up to their name.
We lost more than $25 million on those initial Goodwill Games. Even though we had the same events and so many of the same athletes, these weren’t the true Olympics and in the United States we simply couldn’t draw anywhere near the audience that NBC had for the Olympics. Undeterred, we began planning for the next edition of the Goodwill Games, to be held in the United States. Seattle hosted the games in 1990 and did a great job, but by then the Soviets and Americans had both participated in the 1988 Olympics in South Korea, so boycotts were over. In ’94, the Russian city of St. Petersburg served as our host and while the games continued to attract great athletes, they failed to deliver a large TV audience in the United States. (One of my personal highlights of the St. Petersburg games was meeting my greeter at the airport. The mayor of St. Petersburg had sent his deputy to pick me up and escort us to dinner. His name was Vladimir Putin. He told us that his wife had just been hospitalized after a serious automobile accident. I said, “Don’t have dinner with us. Go home to your wife!” Putin was reluctant because entertaining us was his job but I talked him into going to the hospital. Years later, he told me he’d never forgotten that kindness.
We held two more summer games—1998 in New York City and 2001 in Brisbane, Australia, and in 2000, Lake Placid, New York, hosted the first and only Winter Goodwill Games. By the time of the Brisbane games I was no longer calling the shots at Turner Broadcasting and since the Goodwill Games continued to lose money, Time Warner decided that they would be discontinued. After those many events, our total losses on the games were more than $100 million, but it’s my belief that these games, especially the initial games in 1986, played a major role in helping thaw relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and contributed to the Cold War’s peaceful conclusion.
The Goodwill Games may have lost some money, but in my mind, they were an investment toward peace that was worth every penny.
CBS
I
a was learning very quickly that in television it was better to be big than to be small. The business was a lot like Monopoly, and to be the winner you had to own multiple properties around the board. By 1984 the SuperStation, CNN, and Headline News were growing into solid businesses but it was still a struggle for a company the size of Turner to battle with the traditional Big Three broadcasters for audience and advertising dollars. I was sure that the best way to compete would be to have a broadcast network and the cable networks under the same ownership.
The most logical move would have been for the Big Three broadcasters to diversify into cable. For the first time in their history, they faced competition from outside their ranks and while the individual audiences for cable channels were small, taken together they were gaining meaningful market share. But to my continued amazement, even after missing the twenty-four-hour news opportunity, the networks stayed on the sidelines and watched the launch of other cable channels like Discovery, USA, MTV, and Nickelodeon. They were worrying more about the previous night’s ratings than the long-term future of their business. (ABC was a slight exception. They didn’t create ESPN but they did acquire a minority position and exercised their option to purchase a majority stake years later when the channel was clearly a winner.)
A merger of Turner Broadcasting with a Big Three network made a lot of sense. First of all, there would be tremendous savings in news. CNN had built bureaus all over the world and so had the news divisions of ABC, NBC, and CBS. With a merger, consolidating facilities would result in significant savings, and when these were realized, spending could increase elsewhere. While the broadcast-only networks had four hours a day of news to program, we would have the forty-eight hours on cable (twenty-four hours for both CNN and Headline News). With fifty-two hours against which to amortize the costs, our company would leave the competition in the dust.