The colorful and talkative Southern lord of media and professional sportsman had an uneasy journey to his present seat at the head of one of the world's largest entertainment conglomerates. Ed Turner, a salesman who built a medium-sized advertising company, raised Ted with a combination of close tenderness and rigid discipline. When Ted was nine, the family moved from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Savannah, Georgia. During the summer, the teenage Ted worked 40-hour weeks, mowing the grass around Ed Turner's billboards and creosoting the poles; his father charged him half his salary for room and board.

For high school, Ted was sent to Georgia Military Academy and the military-oriented McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Smart but high-strung, Turner hated military school. He distracted himself with hostile recreations like growing lawn grass in his room. When he was 17, he won the Tennessee state high school debating contest. In the late 1950s, he began studies at Brown University. His father had enrolled him so that he could take business classes; however, he was interested in "grandeur and tradition, glorious and beautiful things," and chose a major in classics. Meanwhile, he perfected his childhood hobby of sailing, and won several medals. Under his father's pressure, he gave up the chance to spend a summer racing in a fleet of Lightning boats in order to work as an account executive for the family business; he also eventually changed his major back to economics.

While his parents' marriage was collapsing at home in Georgia, Turner began to drink with his friends, and was soon suspended from Brown for getting rowdy at a women's college nearby. His father enrolled him in the Coast Guard, but when Ted returned to Brown after six months he was soon caught with female guests in his dorm room, which was not allowed at the time. He was suspended permanently.

~ He resigned himself to working for his father. At the age of 22, he became general manager of the Turner Advertising Company's Macon branch. While running the business, he finally started to become interested in it. When he learned two years later that the elder Turner was going to sell the company to pay off his debts, Ted was enraged. His argument with his father was not simply a family affair, but a bitter business dispute. On March 5, 1963, in the middle of the sell-out procedure, Ed Turner shot himself to death on his plantation in South Carolina.

Ted immediately sold the plantation and bought back the family business. In 1970, he made the risky decision to buy an Atlanta television station, Channel 17. This soon became WTCG, an extremely successful non-network station that gradually expanded to cover the entire country.