GAMES: Nothing's for certain, says grief-stricken Turner

AAP General News (Australia)
08-27-2001
GAMES: Nothing's for certain, says grief-stricken Turner

By Doug Conway, Senior Correspondent

BRISBANE, Aug 27 AAP - If Ted Turner had a mind to, he could hand out cash at the Goodwill
Games prizemoney rate - $A10 million a fortnight - for the next 68 years.

The Games founder is used to shelling out.

Four years ago he announced a gift of almost $A2 billion to the United Nations - reckoned
to be the biggest individual act of philanthropy in the world.

The brash American last year offered his government $60 million to bridge its shortfall
in UN dues.

His Turner Foundation forks out $100 million a year to causes ranging from population
control to saving woodpeckers.

There are smaller donations, too, like the $950 he gave to volunteer firefighters who
helped battle a blaze on one of his ranches in Nebraska.

The CNN cable news pioneer, worth $17 billion after swapping corporate power for cash,
once castigated Bill Gates, who is worth seven times that, for not giving more.

Gates now tops the list of givers.

"I started giving money because I had money," Turner explained in a recent US interview.

"If you're a dancer, dance. If you're a writer, write. If you've got a lot of money, contribute."

Turner's vast wealth has given him just about every boy's toy imaginable.

He owns an NBA basketball team and a baseball team, which he once managed from the dugout.

He won the America's Cup six years before Alan Bond got his hands on it.

But if he appears less than his normal voluble self in Brisbane this week, it may be
because he has also lost many things that money can't buy.

Apart from control of his media empire, he has lost his marriage to Jane Fonda, he
has lost a two-year-old grandchild and, some reports suggest, his will to live.

Turner was said to be suicidal earlier this year after the breakup of his 10-year marriage
to Fonda - his third wife - and his loss of corporate control following two mergers involving
the AOL Time Warner conglomerate.

"I felt like Job," he said, comparing himself with the much-afflicted biblical hero.

Turner, whose father killed himself when Ted was 24, said the marriage ended partly
because his wife "just came home and said, 'I've become a Christian'.

"Before that, she was not a religious person," he told The New Yorker magazine.

"That's a pretty big change for your wife of many years to tell you. That's a shock."

Fonda, the double Oscar-winning actress, said: "I chose not to discuss it with him
because he would have talked me out of it."

Turner's own faith had been shattered long ago by the death of his younger sister Mary
Jane from a painful disease called systemic lupus erythematosus.

If Turner was at a low ebb months ago, he is said to be "inconsolable" following the
death weeks ago of his youngest daughter's youngest daughter from a rare hereditary disease.

It gets worse - another grandchild also has the disease, whose sufferers are not normally
expected to reach their teens.

Such personal grief is said to have reshaped the outlook of the former "Captain Outrageous"

and "Mouth Of The South" who built a media empire from his father's billboard business
and once said: "If only I had a little humility I'd be perfect."

Observers say he is a changed man from the one who called Christianity a religion "for
losers", who compared Rupert Murdoch with Hitler and challenged his rival media baron
to a televised boxing match in Las Vegas.

Turner, 63, acknowledges that the Goodwill Games, which he started as a contribution
to world peace following the Olympic boycotts of the 1980s, may not last forever.

"It's also conceivable that the Olympics won't continue," the noted anti-nuclear campaigner
told Australia's Goodwill Games broadcaster, Channel Nine, last month.

"If we don't do a better job of getting rid of nuclear weapons and cleaning up nuclear
weapons, the human race won't continue.

"Nothing's for certain."

AAP dc/las/br s

KEYWORD: GOOD TURNER (PROFILE)

2001 AAP Information Services Pty Limited (AAP) or its Licensors.