As most of the western world knows by now, Ted Turner, the media mogul, Renaissance man, and balls-to-the-wall maverick from Atlanta, passed away early last week.  And while there are still any number of accounts out there detailing, even lauding, his many accomplishments in life – everything from launching CNN, completely blowing apart then re-imagining the daily news cycle, and rescuing the vast MGM film library from some combination of obscurity and physical decay to winning the prestigious America’s Cup sailboat race – what follows only gently brushes up against those headline-making things.

Instead, what you're about to read is a reflection of how, a full lifetime ago, I crossed paths a handful of times with Mr. Turner and did so in the unlikeliest of ways.  Yet, in the process of those few encounters, I developed an appreciation, even fondness for the man in ways that, years prior, I’d have never imagined possible.

Let’s go back to 1978.  I’m a recent college grad working as a full-time bartender in a downtown Syracuse hotel, and someone not so much burning the candle at both ends as throwing the entire candle into the incinerator and slamming the door shut. It was, I remember, a Thursday, maybe 4:00 AM, and I’d been up all night. I was sitting in my recliner and, between sips and tokes, reading the most recent issue of the Sporting News, my weekly bible of all-things-baseball that had just arrived in the morning mail.

It was a scene in which yours truly, if he’d somehow ever found his life magically projected onto a silver screen, might have been played by a young and terminally wisecracking Bill Murray.

I was, in other words, a kid long on promise and stunningly short on deliverables – a rutting buck of a youngster full of a certain something that for years in this country could always be counted on to straddle that fine line between charm and smarm, a kid (and life) that pretty much embodied every square inch of the concept “rudderless.”

At one point, I took one final toke, put down my magazine, looked at the blank wall just ahead of me, and exhaled.  That’s when I said to no one in particular, "I gotta do something with my life.”

And that, I suppose, was the beginning.

Because the very next day I woke up at the crack of noon, called directory assistance for the phone number of the Atlanta Braves, and told the person to whom I was directed that if Mr. Turner would agree to interview me for a job, I’d walk to the interview from my home in Syracuse.

I’ll never forget the response of that still nameless voice on the other end of the line.  After what felt like ten minutes, but was likely only two or three seconds, he said simply, “OK.”

Forget the naiveté of asking for an entry level job interview with the owner of the whole damn team, it was an offer made in earnest and did so with the purest of intentions.

And that was it.  Next thing I knew, I’d quit my bartending gig and had called a – get this – press conference at the Hotel Syracuse to announce my plans to walk 900 miles for my very first real-life job interview – one with the new madman owner of my favorite baseball team.

Let’s fast forward here.

I’ll spare you most of the gory details of the walk itself (that is, indeed, another story for another time), but what’s important to keep in mind in the context of this tale is that, on my walk, each time I’d make it to yet another town that had either a weekly newspaper or, in a few cases, a daily one, I’d leave the reporter who interviewed me two stamped and pre-addressed envelopes, both in hot pink (so as to get noticed).

One was addressed to my parents, who were busy assembling a scrapbook.

The second was addressed to Turner, in care of his team and stadium. The goal, I suppose, was to make the man aware of my ability to gin up media interest in a story that I, myself, had concocted.

That’s also to say that, for better or worse, Ted knew I was coming and that, little by little, I was getting closer each day.

But, again, in the interest of skipping ahead, when I got to the Atlanta Fulton County Stadium, it was a rainy and unusually chilly day (especially for April).  There was no one from the Braves outside to greet me and, indeed, I had to wait in the reception area for what felt like an hour until some low level gofer came out to usher me back into the general office area.

It was not, certainly, what I’d been expecting, much less hoping for.  And it was, as well, a Thursday – April 5, as I recall – the day before the 1979 baseball season kicked off and the Braves opened at home, a contest that that year pitted them against the Astros of Houston.

I was told by the Braves' PR director that, while they couldn’t offer me a front office job, the team's management would give me every opportunity to prove my mettle as a member of their ground crew – meaning they’d be willing to pay me minimum wage (roughly $2 an hour at the time) to work maybe five hours a day for a total of 81 home games.  That's it.

I was told, however, that I would not be interviewed by Mr. Turner.

“But that wasn’t our deal,” I protested.

Regardless, I was dismissed out of hand by the head PR guy and instructed that I’d be introduced to the local media at a press conference they had scheduled for the noon hour, one during which Ted Turner and manager Bobby Cox would be discussing the state of the Braves' current roster with the local press.

To say I was crestfallen wouldn’t begin to scratch the surface of my sense of betrayal. Regardless, I asked someone for directions and dutifully began working my way toward the Stadium Club, a bar/restaurant area in the ballpark, where I’d then bide my time waiting for said press conference to commence.

I remember sitting alone with my thoughts, alone at the end of the bar, wondering what the hell had just happened.  After walking for 50 days straight, and walking alone through all kinds of inclement weather, everything from frigid cold and wind to pelting rain, I was almost numb with disbelief.  Certainly, I’d never treat someone that way I was being treated now. I just wasn’t brought up that way.

Sure enough, little by little, folks began to filter in to the restaurant for the press conference, and before long there were maybe 75 people crowded around the once-empty Stadium Club bar, most of them ordering a soft drink.  It was, after all, not yet noon.

Then, at one point, every head in the place began turning in one direction and I started to hear the rumble of a low murmur.  There in the doorway stood a man significantly taller than I’d imagined him being. It was Ted who, if nothing else, possessed a clear and almost kingly sense of presence.

Just like virtually every other southern businessman in 1979, the Braves' owner was clad in the uniform of his place and time: blue sport coat, grey flannel pants, white cotton buttoned down shirt, and a yellow silk neckpiece that for a number of years used to be called a power tie.

I, on the other hand, was a 23-year-old kid wearing the very same worn-out clothes I’d been sporting for nearly two months: faded jeans, white tee shirt, open collar flannel shirt and a beat up old baseball cap. In other words, especially in that sea of southern business sameness, lock-step thinking, and implied-but-ultimately imagined power, I stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Ted eventually approached the bar and immediately drawled loudly above the din of the room to the bartender to give him a vodka.  However, even as he made his way through the crowd, and even before he reached the bar itself, he suddenly blurted out something that completely caught me off guard.

As some reading this might already know, my last name is pronounced very much like the word “until,” only with an “A."  But that’s not what stopped me or made my heart momentarily sink in my chest.

It was when Ted, even as one of his minions handed him his drink blurted out in his trademark raspy drawl – a vocal mash up that, in his case, seemed to occupy the vast divide between the sound of a normal human voice and full-on yelling, “WHERE’S ANT HILL?"

Then, the Braves' owner didn’t so much laugh as he cackled.  And being that so many in the room likely worked for the guy, a number of those on hand did much the same thing, laughing at me right along with their boss.

What’s more, rather than look my way (I was at the far end of the bar, to Turner's right, maybe thirty or so feet from him) the team's owner took a big swig and kept looking straight ahead into the mirror that sat behind the bartender.

“I’m, uh, I’m down here, Mr. Turner,” I replied, slowly raising my hand with a level of uncertainty and sheepishness that, to be fair, I’d never really known in my life.

“So, you walked all the way down here from New York, huh?” Turner bellowed in that southern bark-talk tone of his. “HOW’S YOUR FEET?” he then snapped pointedly, while still not looking at me.

“Not bad,” I said, somewhat steadier now, “given that I just walked a thousand miles.”

He wouldn’t let go, though, and kept digging.  “WHERE Y’ALL SLEEPIN’ TONIGHT?”

“I really don’t know.  I just got into town.”

It was then that I realized that every last head in the room was now ping-ponging back and forth between the two of us, not unlike a crowd watching a tennis match, everyone in the room turning their head left then right in anticipation of what came next – a realization that only added to my heightened of anxiety.

“WELL, I’LL TELL YA WHAT – ANT HILL,” he chirped, this time stretching out his caustic mispronunciation of my name as though gleefully trying to rub my nose in it, “SINCE YOU’RE SUCH A BIG BASEBALL FAN, WHY DON’T YOU SLEEP BY HOME PLATE TONIGHT?”

He then laughed caustically at his own cruel joke, and did so in a way that not only echoed his cackle of just a few seconds ago, but made me, standing alone in a crowd of strangers at the far end of the bar, feel like the human equivalent of something he’d just stepped in.

And, of course, much of the room quickly followed their boss’s lead and let me know just how much (or little) they all thought of me and my walk, laughing loudly – this despite what I’d just done in the name of the very team they all worked for.

I, of course, never did go to work for Ted Turner or the Braves.  But again, that’s another story for another time.

That said, at this point let’s again fast forward. It’s now a dozen or so years later. Ted has since launched CNN, TNT, and TCM.  He's also yet to sell his company, Turner Broadcasting, to Warner Bros. And while he still owns the Braves wholly, they’re now little more than an afterthought to him. His mind is now fixed squarely on gaining distribution for his growing family of TV networks – and that means making deeper inroads in the still-fledgling cable industry and strengthening his many ties there.

It’s the Western Cable Show, a major industry trade convention held late each year in Anaheim. The show's also something of a magnet that attracts thousands of cable operators and distributors from every point west of the Mississippi, including some of the most headstrong and independent men and women in the world.  It is, I'm guessing, 1990 or ’91.

On the floor of the exhibit hall one day, I’m walking by the sprawling new Turner Broadcasting booth.  There, standing with a few of his senior affiliate reps, I see Ted.  For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I made an immediate left turn and walked up to the crowd of Turner employees gathered around their boss, two of whom I knew.

After some brief small talk, I approached and stuck out my hand.  “Ted,” I said, “M.C. Antil.”

He looked at me for a moment, cocked his head knowingly, and said with something of a half-smile, “Yeah, I know you. You work for Bobby Miron, right?” referencing my boss.

“I do,” I said.

“Give him my best.  I like Bobby.  He’s a good guy.”

“I will,” I said almost dismissively, before quickly adding, “Hey, Ted, can I tell you a story?”

I then proceeded to relate to him a highly truncated version of our first encounter, the one in Atlanta a decade or so prior.

He looked at me, hesitated a moment, and then asked, “You did what?”

I cut him off and frowned.  “Oh, c’mon. Please. Stop. Don’t give me that bullsh*t.  Don’t tell me you don’t remember when a guy walks a thousand miles for a job interview with you.  That's just not the sort of thing that someone forgets.”

He looked at me for another good moment before finally confessing (in a far less Ted-like tone). “Yeah, well, I seem to recall something like that,” before adding, his face now lit up as though he’d just had a moment of divine clarity, “Well, why the hell didn’t ya try to get a job in cable?”

I said, “Because back then there was no cable.”

“Oh yeah,” he drawled somewhat sheepishly, now even softer than before.

Then, looking at me in a way I’ll never forget, he asked directly, “Let me get this straight. You walked all the way from New York to Atlanta for an interview?”

I said, “Yeah.”

“And I treated you like that?”

“Yeah.”

And this is the part that still hits me where I live.

It was then that I first saw a glimpse of Ted Turner, not as a maverick or a storied media tycoon, and not as some larger-than-life cartoon character who constantly served as a walking sound bite for anyone with a microphone or a notepad, but as a fellow human being. I saw him as a normal guy with normal, everyday flaws and shortcomings, one whose colorful past would keep popping up at the most unexpected times, and in the unlikeliest of places – a past that, at that point, was still somehow simultaneously deifying and dogging him.

By many accounts, a few of which were related to me by friends in the industry who knew him well, by the tail end of 1990, Ted had become a far more clear-eyed, clear-minded and empathetic man than he’d ever been before. He also just might have been in treatment for any number of mental health issues and chemical imbalances -- all of which had, possibly, been a part of his psychological makeup for years.

The owner of my favorite team and the most vitally important person my industry would ever know, just looked me in the eye, shrugged, and said without even a wisp of uncertainty, “Well, sh*t.  I’m sorry.”

For years, I used to tell folks that my walk to Atlanta might not have gotten me the job I wanted.  But it earned me something rarer and far more elusive.  It got me something that few people anywhere, living or dead, could ever say they got from Ted Turner.

An apology.

But that little wise-ass and largely dismissive distillation of the stunt I’d once pulled to try to land my very first job soon gave way to a more profound and deeper understanding of the man who stood at the very center of that crazy job search

Because years later, especially as I watched folks around me continue to compromise themselves in some toxic mix of money, fame, security, convenience and, for lack of a better description, a path of least resistance, I began viewing Ted Turner in a different, far more forgiving light.

I slowly but surely began seeing Ted Turner no longer as the “Mouth of the South” or the guy who once claimed to be “cable when cable wasn’t cool,” but as a man of deep principle and a downright steely mix of spine, guts, and fortitude, one whose sense of who he was, what he stood for, and what he believed in was matched only by his relentless courage in the pursuit of staying true to those things.

For example, following his marriage to actress Jane Fonda, when he moved by himself up to rural Montana – a state I too have recently gotten to know and love – and started buying thousands of square miles of raw and mostly untouched prairie land, it was thought by many that he was simply being shrewd and forward-thinking yet again. I had, for example, more than a few old work colleagues tell me what Ted was doing in Montana was not so much about buying what was above the ground, as it was about buying what was beneath it.  It was, they contended, the CNN founder gobbling up as many water rights as possible in a part of the country that was soon going to be in desperate need of the stuff.  “Ted’s likely to make billions with all those underground water rights he's acquired,” they’d tell me.

“He doesn’t care about conservation or ranching,” they’d say.  “He’s just being his typically brilliant speculator.  That’s why he’s buying up so much contiguous land in the middle of nowhere.”

But you know what?  Those people were wrong back then. And they still wrong today. Because, as it turns out, Ted Turner might have liked business, but what he loved – especially late in life – was nature.  And he loved the land that God had blessed him with – in fact, blessed us all of us with – the same bountiful and beautiful little planet that He’d hoped those in positions of power and influence, people exactly like Ted, would someday protect and defend with every ounce of whatever wealth they'd been able to accumulate.

And that’s exactly what Ted did.

And in doing that, he’d emerge as one of the most profoundly impactful conservationists in human history, eventually buying and designating as “forever wild” nearly two million pristine acres in places like Argentina and the American West.

In addition, he’d oversee a massive reintroduction of the American bison into its natural habitat, eventually building a herd of “genetically pure” bison numbering nearly 50,000 head – the largest single herd anywhere – an accomplishment that landed him, as one might expect, in the American Bison Hall of Fame.

That said, now that he’s gone, there are three things that I’ll always think of whenever I call to mind the remarkable dreamer who changed his world like few others, before or since.

First, much like (I’m guessing) John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates, he’ll be forever remembered for all he accomplished in business.  Yet, the thing about which he was likely the proudest – especially near the end of his run – was the extent to which he made the very world that helped shape him a richer, healthier, and far more textured place, especially once he began using the billions he’d amassed to change Mother Earth's fate and future.

Second – and this one is one that truly strikes home for yours truly, a lifelong accidental bachelor – you want to know the true measure of any man?  Ask his former lovers about him and listen to the deep affection that pours from between the lines of just about everything they have to tell you   To that end, I urge you to read Jane Fonda’s recent essay on Ted, the man she, after six decades worth of marriage to men of all kinds of fame and power, now regularly refers to as her “favorite ex-husband.”

But, mostly, think of how often in your own life you might have done something completely differently had, back then, you only had the courage of your convictions.

That was Ted Turner, a great businessman, yes.  But also, just maybe, the single most principled and fearless man I've was ever lucky enough to meet.

Godspeed, Ted.  And from all of us who were paying attention all these years – especially that one crazy Yankee by way of New York who you once treated like something you’d just stepped in – thanks for the courage you always showed, the way you always refused to compromise your principles, and just how fearlessly you always chose the road less traveled.