Former WCW Owner Ted Turner Passes Away

Ted Turner, the former owner of World Championship Wrestling and a key figure in the Monday Night Wars that would define professional wrestling during the 1990s, has passed away.

It was announced today by Turner Enterprises that Turner had passed away at the age of 87. No cause of death was revealed, but Turner had been battling Lewy body dementia since 2018.

While primarily famous for being the founder of CNN, the first 24-hour cable news channel, and TBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable TV, Ted Turner also left an indelible mark upon professional wrestling.

This began in the early 1970s when Georgia Championship Wrestling started airing on what would become known as TBS, with the programme being renamed to World Championship Wrestling in 1982. This deal would see Ted Turner interact with Vince McMahon when, in July 1984, the Brisco brothers sold their shares in GCW to McMahon, with the WWF owner receiving GCW's time slot on TBS in the process in what became known as Black Saturday.

TBS viewers weren't fans of the World Wrestling Federation, however, and McMahon sold the time slot to Jim Crockett Promotions in March 1985. In November 1988, amid financial difficulties for JCP, Ted Turner got into the rasslin' business and purchased Jim Crockett Promotions, with the company being renamed to World Championship Wrestling. The promotion would remain a part of the National Wrestling Alliance until splitting off from the NWA in the early 1990s.

While a small cog in Turner's media empire, WCW would remain on the air as long as Ted Turner was around, much to the chagrin of other Turner executives. This would lead to a fateful decision in 1995 when Ted Turner agreed with a pitch from Eric Bischoff and decided to give WCW a primetime slot on Monday nights directly against WWF's flagship Monday Night Raw. On September 4, 1995, WCW Monday Nitro premiered on TNT and kicked off the Monday Night Wars.

The pro wrestling war would prove successful for WCW in the early years, with Monday Nitro defeating Raw in the ratings battle for 83 consecutive weeks beginning in June 1996, while WCW briefly became the number one pro wrestling promotion in the world.

The rise of the Attitude era in WWF would see Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation regain top spot, though, and McMahon would eventually buy WCW in March of 2001 after Ted Turner effectively lost his power within Time Warner amid the company's disastrous merger with AOL that year.

Ted Turner would have no more involvement in professional wrestling after WCW, with Turner eventually stepping away from day-to-day corporate life to oversee major conservation projects in the United States.