Life is like a B-Movie. You don’t want to leave in the middle of it, but you don’t want to see it again.
Ted Turner
So, you want to own a sports franchise, do you? Well, you better start saving your money.
According to celebritynetworth.com, Hawks owner Tony Ressler is worth about $3 billion. Falcons owner Arthur Blank is worth more than twice that. The other team owner in Atlanta, Liberty Media, has a market cap of $12.39 billion.
It’s big business, and it’s not for the timid.
Which I suppose is a good thing. Without some ruthless and creative individuals, Atlanta might not have the Braves.
On Nov. 17, 1962 — about a month after President John F. Kennedy was shown the first photos confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba — Lou Perini sold the Milwaukee Braves to a consortium headed up by Bill Bartholomay.
Perini had moved the Braves to Milwaukee from Boston following the 1952 season when the team drew less than 300,000 fans.
By 1957, the Braves had Henry Aaron and Eddie Matthews and had won a World Series, drawing more than two million fans to boot that year.
The consortium that bought the Braves in 1962 was made up of young Wisconsin men, but three years after the purchase, the cheeseheads wanted Bartholomay’s head on a platter.
By 1963, the Braves had fallen into the second division and drew less than 800,000 fans. By 1966, they were gone with the wind. The new owners moved them to Atlanta, and Henry Aaron — who wore No. 44 — hit 44 homers, most of them landing in the vicinity of Chief Knockahoma’s teepee in left field.
Ten years later, Aaron was back in Milwaukee playing for the Brewers and the Braves were purchased by Ted Turner who owned his own television superstation. WTBS broadcast almost every game the Braves played.
This was manna from heaven to me.
“You mean I can watch the Braves every night if I want to?” Ted Turner was my man.
According to a story dated Dec. 21, 2021 by Dan Scholossberg on forbes.com, Ted embraced “zany publicity stunts that included Headlock & Wedlock Day, wet T-shirt contests and a Farrah Fawcett-Majors lookalike contest. He pushed a ping-pong ball around the infield with his nose, joined a pre-game bathtub race, helped ball girls sweep the bases between innings, jumped fences to greet home-run hitters, and even managed the team for a day after a 16-game losing streak and donned a uniform [as manager] before Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn killed the idea. He even had THE ENEMY painted on the roof of the visitors’ dugout.”
Liberty Media doesn’t have quite the same flare for promotion.
But Ted was just following in the footsteps of Veeck who lost his leg after it was crushed by a recoiling piece of artillery equipment during World War II. Since he liked to smoke, he installed ashtrays in his prosthetic leg.
When he owned the minor league Milwaukee Brewers in the 1940s, he staged some wild promotions. “He gave away live animals and birds, a 200-pound block of ice, scheduled morning games for night-shift workers, staged weddings at home plate and presented his manager with a birthday cake, out of which popped a much-needed southpaw pitcher,” according to an espn.com story by Nick Acocella.
After he bought the Cleveland Indians, Veeck signed Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, and brought in 42-year-old legend Satchel Paige to pitch. He was rewarded for this excellent karma with a World Series title in 1948, Cleveland’s first since 1920.
All of that was before my time, but I do remember one of his promotional stunts while he was the owner of the Chicago White Sox in 1979: Disco Demolition Night, which was a local disc jockey’s plan to destroy disco records between games of a doubleheader.
I blame this mess squarely on Rod Stewart who had released the “Blondes Have More Fun” album the previous year, a record that included the song “Do You Think I’m Sexy.” The song is now used to torture dissidents in Chinese prisons, I believe.
Some disco songs might have been at least tolerable, but Rod’s song pushed Rock N Roll fans beyond the breaking point.
When the records exploded, deliriously happy fans jumped onto the field, and the police were helpless to stop them. The second game of the doubleheader was ultimately forfeited by the White Sox.
How about let’s sing a song:
“Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end. We’d sing and dance forever and a day.”*
Whoa! Wait! No singing until the column is finished.
But I thought it was finished.
That’s just the first draft, dude. You still have to edit and revise. And don’t add anything to it. Or else the column will get fat like its author.
Selah.
*Song lyric by Gene Raskin