Turner wanted to use sports events to create peaceful conditions worldwide.
Ted Turner has passed away and has left quite the legacy. There are so many aspects to the life of Ted Turner that taken individually would fill up tens of thousands of essays. Ted Turner thought he could be a peacemaker through sports and accidentally led the National Basketball Association into the world of globalization in the late 1980s. Turner said that when he ran CNN, he had access to powerful world leaders because they knew his network shaped global coverage. “I was even friends with Fidel Castro and Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin. I was friends with all of them.”
Turner was dismayed with the United States’ boycott of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games because of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Soviet Union’s not showing up at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. In 1984, he decided a good way to get the ball rolling toward peace between the west, including the United States, and the Iron Curtain countries of the Cold War era was to have an Olympics like event. Turner called his event, the Goodwill Games. Turner was trying to figure out how he could force an end to Cold War with CNN International and his international sports event, the Goodwill Games, a friendly competition between the US and the Soviet Union in 1986 according to Jack Kelly, one of Turner’s executives. Then Turner, the owner of the National Basketball Association’s Atlanta Hawks franchise, received permission to send his team to the Soviet Union for the 1988 pre-season training camp. In August 1989, Turner signed Aleksander Volkov. Volkov was the second Soviet to sign with an NBA franchise that summer. The NBA’s real road to globalization started with Ted Turner’s pursuit of world peace and his relationship with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
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