Ted, an Elevator, and the World He Built

CNN founder changed television, but what stayed with me was one small kindness on my first day

#Opinion • 9:05 p.m. May 6, 2026

Ted Turner has died at 87, and the public obituary will need a lot of room.

Maverick. Visionary. Billionaire. Boat captain. Sports owner. Media mogul. “Mouth of the South.” “Captain Outrageous.” The man who turned a small Atlanta television station into a superstation, built CNN, changed cable news forever, owned the Braves and Hawks, won the America’s Cup, gave $1 billion to support United Nations causes, and spent the back half of his life thinking about land, wildlife, conservation, and the future of the planet.

All of those things are true.

But the thing I keep coming back to is much smaller.

An elevator.

A first day.

And a man who had no reason in the world to remember my name – but did.

First day, 10th floor

My first day with CNN/Sports Illustrated, I checked in at the security desk, rode the escalator to the second floor, and stood in front of a bank of elevators. Walking into that building on my first day felt like stepping into the center of the sports-media universe.

I pushed the button for 10 South.

That was where I was headed. That was the floor. That was the job. That was the beginning of the rest of my career.

The elevator arrived, and I stepped inside alone.

For just a second, I let myself feel it. I took a deep breath. You only get so many first days like that. The kind where everything feels possible and terrifying at the same time. The kind where you are trying to look like you belong while quietly hoping nobody notices you are not sure where your desk is, what your login is, or whether you are about to get off on the wrong floor.

Then, just as the doors started to close, a hand reached in.

The doors opened again.

A man stepped inside.

I took two steps back and looked straight ahead.

He looked over.

“First day?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Hi, I’m Ted.”

That was it.

No speech. No grand entrance. No corporate performance. Just a man in an elevator introducing himself to a new kid on his first day.

A couple of weeks later, Ted stepped into another elevator. This time, there were a few of us inside.

He looked over.

“Hey, Duane.”

There was no reason for him to remember me.

I will never forget that he did.

The man who broke television

That is the strange thing about famous people. The public remembers the scale. The headlines. The deals. The fights. The trophies. The failures. The triumphs.

But the people who crossed paths with them often remember something smaller.

A sentence.

A look.

A hand through an elevator door.

Ted Turner’s public life was almost impossible to reduce. Born Robert Edward Turner III, he inherited a billboard business after his father’s death and somehow built one of the defining media empires of the modern era.

He saw cable television before most Americans even knew what it was.

He understood that a local Atlanta station did not have to stay local. He understood that satellites could make television bigger, faster, stranger, and more national than the old network order ever imagined.

He also understood appetite.

Sports fans wanted more games. Movie fans wanted more movies. News junkies wanted the world in real time. Turner looked at the old broadcast model – three networks, fixed schedules, familiar rules – and seemed to take it personally.

So he broke it.

When the world filled the hours

TBS helped make the “superstation” feel normal. CNN, launched in 1980, made 24-hour news feel inevitable. At first, plenty of people thought the idea was ridiculous. Who needed news all day? Who would watch? How would you fill the hours?

Turner’s answer was simple enough: The world would fill the hours.

And it did.

By the Gulf War in 1991, CNN was no longer a punchline or curiosity. It was the place millions turned when history was moving too fast for the morning paper and the evening news. Television news changed because Ted Turner insisted it could.

That does not mean every change was clean or harmless.

CNN gave the world a front-row seat to history. It also helped create a world that rarely looks away, rarely powers down, and often confuses speed with understanding. Both things can be true.

I saw that world from inside the CNN Center and Techwood.

Hanging chads. Dale Earnhardt’s death. Sept. 11. Hurricane Katrina. The iPhone. Obama. The Red Sox ending The Curse. ’Roids. Kobe’s 81. The Patriots dynasty. Phelps times eight. Tiger. Serena. Lance Armstrong. March Madness. Johnny Football. Bama. Goodbye, Big East. Jerry Sandusky. Butler basketball. And my favorite: the CWS.

Some of it was history. Some of it was spectacle. Some of it was joy. Some of it was horror. Some of it was the kind of thing you remember by where you were standing when the newsroom changed pitch.

And woven through all of it were the people – too many friendships to count, and even more memories.

That was Turner, too.

Not just the man, but the world he imagined. A place where the world could crash through the door at any hour, and everybody inside had to figure out what it meant, what mattered, and how to tell it before the next thing happened.

He was not made for marble. He was too loud for that, too restless, too contradictory, too human.

He could be charming and blunt, generous and impossible, visionary and reckless. His mouth often ran ahead of the room. His ambition often outran the conventional wisdom. Sometimes that made him look like a genius. Sometimes it made him look like a man who had thrown the steering wheel out the window and decided to aim by instinct.

He wanted the wheel

He owned the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks. He owned World Championship Wrestling. He helped build TNT, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies, and other pieces of a television universe that stretched far beyond CNN.

He won the America’s Cup in 1977 as skipper of Courageous, which says something essential about him. Turner did not just want to own the boat.

He wanted to captain it.

That instinct seemed to run through everything he touched.

He wanted to be in the arena. He wanted to push the thing until it became something else.

And then, in the later chapters of his life, he turned much of that restless energy toward land, wildlife, conservation, nuclear threat reduction, and global philanthropy. He became one of the largest private landowners in the United States. He raised bison. He co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He made a historic $1 billion pledge to support United Nations causes, a move that led to the creation of the United Nations Foundation.

For a man who made his fortune shrinking the world through television, there was something fitting about his later obsession with preserving pieces of the actual world – grassland, wildlife, open space, places that did not care about ratings or market share.

Maybe that was a contradiction.

Maybe it was growth.

Maybe it was simply Turner – unable to leave even the future alone.

What power remembers

I think about the Ted Turner the world knew through headlines, and then I think about the Ted Turner I met in an elevator. Those are not separate men. That is the point.

The same man who could bulldoze his way through an industry could also notice a new employee on his first day.

The same man whose name was on buildings and networks could offer a simple, “Hi, I’m Ted,” as if the introduction were necessary.

That does not absolve a person of flaws. It does not sand off the rough edges. It does not turn a complicated life into a greeting card.

But legacy is never only the big thing.

It is also the small thing.

Ted Turner’s big thing was enormous. He changed how people watched television. He changed how news moved. He changed Atlanta. He changed sports broadcasting. He changed cable. He changed the rhythm of public life.

Anyone who has ever watched breaking news unfold in real time has lived in a world he helped build.

I know, because for a while, I got to live inside that world.

I saw the stories come in. I saw the place react. I saw ordinary workdays turn into days people would talk about for the rest of their lives. I saw a newsroom become a memory factory, not because anyone planned it that way, but because the world kept arriving and Turner had built a place big enough, fast enough, and strange enough to receive it.

But somewhere inside all of that scale was a man on an elevator, stepping into an ordinary workday, asking a young employee if it was his first day.

That memory has stayed with me longer than a lot of bigger moments.

Maybe because first days matter.

Maybe because names matter.

Maybe because people with power reveal something about themselves in the moments when they do not have to perform kindness, but do anyway.

Ted Turner was a lot of things.

Billboard salesman. Boat captain. Team owner. Television visionary. Billionaire. Conservationist. Provocateur. Builder. Disrupter.

And he was human.

That is the part worth holding onto today.

Not because it is the whole story.

Because once, Ted Turner stepped into an elevator, remembered my name, and made 10 South feel like home.