Ernie Johnson pays tribute to Ted Turner: ‘He was an everyman to me’

Across all the sports properties and programming that Turner Sports put on over the years in its various forms, nobody has represented the network to more fans than Ernie Johnson.

In fact, Johnson’s relationship to Ted Turner, who passed away on Wednesday at the age of 87, was a family affair. Johnson’s father and namesake was the voice of the Atlanta Braves under the stewardship of Turner, who put the team’s games on his TBS network starting in the late 1970s.

After being hired at the network himself, the younger Ernie Johnson became a beloved fixture on NBA, MLB, and college basketball coverage. Johnson even worked NFL, Wimbledon, golf, and Olympics coverage at a time when Turner Sports (now TNT Sports) was a more prominent sports broadcasting destination.

Johnson joined CNN shortly after the news of Turner’s passing to honor the late media titan.

Ernie Johnson joined CNN to discuss Ted Turner’s legacy ⤵️

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“I would say it’s a melancholy kind of day here … and it’s a day of reflection, really, for me,” Johnson said. “It’s been a long time since he’s had direct involvement with the company, and the way things go these days with acquisitions and mergers and all that stuff, but deep down, in here, I’ll always be Turner.”

Johnson also described Turner as a visionary in the sports and media industries, starting with his plan to make the Braves a national team through TBS.

“I think that what he did back then really has set the standard for what we’re doing these days, how we watch live sports,” Johnson explained.

“It was his vision to say … number one, he bought the Braves so he could put the Braves on TV. So it was programming time, OK? There was an agenda there. Because he wasn’t a big baseball guy. But the Braves were on TBS, and then he was like, why don’t we use a satellite to beam them all over the country? And then the Braves were America’s team.”

Turner also helped popularize pro wrestling by competing with the WWE in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and played a role in the birth of 24/7 news when he launched CNN in 1980.

Today, Johnson remains host of Inside the NBA, which is now licensed by and airs on ESPN. The parent company of TNT Sports and CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery, was purchased by Paramount earlier this year.

Johnson acknowledged that the business looks far different than it did when Turner revolutionized it from Atlanta a half-century ago, but expressed an admiration at the juggernaut that Turner built off of savvy and instinct.

“He was an everyman to me, but a guy who had this intense drive,” Johnson said.

“I always considered him an underdog … that he was going to do these things that no one expected. And he would do it with this gut feeling that it was the right thing to do, and that he would consider all the options and all the analytics, and then his gut would tell him what to do. And it served him well.”