In viewing the history of wrestling...oops a, I mean sports entertainment, Vince likes to paint a negative portrait of Ted Turner's dealings during wcw's existence, including the period when WWF was aired on TBS following the GWC purchase.
Vince's seeming negative opinion of Ted has got me thinking. Do you think part of Vince's willingness to rip apart WCW (and Ted by proxy) is due to personal jealousy?
Like Vince, Ted can be considered an even most successful businessman than his father as he took over a family businessman and turned it into a multimedia empire, but unlike Vince, his success has not just occurred in a single field, while Vince works hard to downplay his failures in other mediums (WBL, XFL, WWE Films, the Network).
Ted Turner has his name or involvement in several cable stations including TNT, TBS, TCM, and CNN, where as Vince has murky relationships with television stations which have only gotten worse (for wwe) in the last decade.
Ted has a successful (and tasty) chain of restaurants in Ted's Montana Grill, while Vince could barely keep wwf New York (later The World) running.
Ted owns the Atlanta Braves, and later early left it to be run by professionals (albeit after some major mistakes on his part), while Vince's XFL experiment is still a punchline over a decade after it blinked in and out of existence.
Ted owns a significant amount of film history produced by MGM (pre 1986) while WWE films strives to make a film that does well outside of direct to DVD.
Ted has a good association with the United Nations, while Vince's wife failed to win a senate race.
Ted seems to be the opposite of Vince as while WCW did go under, he's achieved success far beyond it, and he was fairly successful before then too, while Vince is unable to be successful in any field but wrestling
Does Vince see in Ted Turner the man he wishes he could be and hates him for it?
I would say that there's very little question that Vince has been harboring an inferiority complex towards Billionaire Ted since the Georgia debacle in 84. The fact that Vince always painted himself in competition with Turner, even at the points when Ted was little more than a source of money for WCW who wasn't any more involved than green-lighting decisions, shows how jealous Vince really was.
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