Joe CapozziIt started with a friendship born on the high seas and ended with two major league teams training in Abacoa — but not Turner’s Atlanta Braves.
Ted Turner offered a bold promise upon his arrival in West Palm Beach for his first spring training as owner of the Atlanta Braves.
“As long as I own the Braves, there is one thing I’ll never change,” he told reporters in February 1976, “and that’s spring training in West Palm Beach. We’ll always be here.”
But “always” didn’t mean forever.
Twenty years later, the Braves tomahawk-chopped more than 30 years of West Palm tradition, as The Palm Beach Post wrote, and announced they were moving their spring training operations to Disney World.
It was Turner who sealed the deal in a phone call with Disney CEO Michael Eisner, shocking Palm Beach County government and business leaders who’d spent four years negotiating to build the Braves a new stadium.
But the abrupt move, still a sore subject for many longtime locals, shouldn’t define his legacy in Palm Beach County.
Turner, who died May 6 at age 87, played an indirect but significant early role in shaping the county into the premier Florida Grapefruit League hub that it is today, home to four teams in two shared spring training facilities about 12 miles apart.
It was Turner who nurtured the initial vision for a self-contained community anchored by a baseball stadium, an idea first pitched to him in 1983 by a West Palm Beach yachting friend, developer George de Guardiola.
De Guardiola’s concept eventually blossomed into Abacoa, the 6,000-home community north of Donald Ross Road built around a baseball stadium, college campus and town center. The stadium and the potential for Turner’s TBS to add a significant employment center played a pivotal role in persuading growth-averse public officials to get behind the massive project.
The stadium was meant to host the Braves, but they abandoned the area for Disney World before Roger Dean Stadium opened in 1998. The county salvaged the project when the St . Louis Cardinals stepped in to share the ballpark with the Montreal Expos. (The Marlins made it their spring training home in 2003, replacing the Expos.)
Even without the Braves, the stadium became such a success it persuaded the county in 2017 to open a second spring training complex, this one in West Palm Beach for the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals.
Today, Palm Beach is Florida’s only county with a pair of two-team facilities. The two tourism home runs have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the area’s economy, including an economic impact of nearly $78 million in 2025, according to the Palm Beach County Sports Commission.
The facilities resulted from hard work by a team of elected officials and business leaders spanning some 25 years. But it might not have happened if not for Turner and de Guardiola, who died in 2023, embracing the early concept that became Abacoa.
“I think they both were visionary individuals who could see a bigger picture on a blank canvas,” said Dennis Grady, the retired CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of the Palm Beaches who served on a baseball task force in the 1990s. “And to our benefit, this is a premier spring training destination.”
Here’s how it all unfolded, according to a review of news archives and interviews with people involved in the negotiations.
‘Friend of Ted Turner joins battle for Braves’
Turner first arrived in town as a 37-year-old communications executive and yachtsman who’d just bought the Braves for $12 million. The Braves had been training at West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium since 1963, three years before the team left Milwaukee for Atlanta and 13 years before Turner became owner.
In fact, during his ownership of the team from 1976 to 1996, the Braves enjoyed a longer connection with West Palm Beach than Atlanta.
The Montreal Expos shared the stadium with the Braves from 1969 to 1972, then returned in 1981 after eight years in Daytona Beach. But the Braves, with stars Hank Aaron, Phil Niekro and Dale Murphy, were West Palm’s favored sons.
Turner, a heavy hitter himself for pioneering the 24-hour news cycle and CNN, was a spring fixture at the ballpark off Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard. He courted the media and mingled with fans. After he married the actress Jane Fonda in 1991, the couple often could be seen in the first row behind the Atlanta dugout.
By then, the clock was ticking on the teams’ stadium lease, set to expire in 1995.
In 1992, West Palm Beach Mayor Nancy Graham agreed to work with county officials and business leaders to keep the Braves and Expos in town — even as she looked to shut down the city’s Municipal Stadium as a financial belt-tightening move.
Both teams were being wooed by other cities, including Naples, Pompano Beach and Homestead, with the promise of new stadiums. The pressure was on for West Palm to give each team its own ballpark.
And to make it happen for the Braves, local officials knew they ultimately had to woo Turner.
Even though Turner was never directly involved in negotiations, his input to his Turner Broadcasting Systems intermediaries influenced the negotiations with local government officials.
He also had the ear of a trusted confidante, a person not employed by TBS or the Braves — his friend de Guardiola.
Graham and County Commission Chair Karen Marcus spearheaded the creation of a city-county baseball task force made up of community leaders to screen and evaluate potential Braves spring training sites.
“Friend of Ted Turner joins battle for Braves” was the headline of a Post story about de Guardiola joining the task force in August 1992.
An idea hatched on a yacht off England
While de Guardiola was regarded as a personable, well-connected developer who had worked on the development of Wellington, he was added to the task force for a specific reason — his friendship with Turner.
The two avid yachtsmen had been introduced to each other a decade earlier by a mutual friend. As the American representative at the 1983 Admiral’s Cup race, de Guardiola invited Turner, winner of the 1977 America’s Cup, to join his crew aboard Locura (“craziness” or “folly” in Spanish), his 43-foot yacht, off the coast of England for six weeks.
As the yacht plied the choppy waters around the Isle of Wight, the Braves owner and the Cuban-born developer for the first time batted around the idea of a Palm Beach County spring training stadium anchoring a development of homes and businesses.
“We had an opportunity to get to know each other and exchange a lot of ideas,” de Guardiola said in 1993. “That was the incubation of this concept.”
When de Guardiola returned home, he enlisted the West Palm Beach firm Urban Design Studio to draw up plans for a 1,280-acre community of businesses, homes and a ballpark.
According to news stories, de Guardiola said he and Turner started negotiating with the owner of land near Florida’s Turnpike and Forest Hill Boulevard. But the deal went nowhere, and the idea was shelved.
If Turner ever discussed or acknowledged de Guardiola’s story about their 1983 baseball discussion at sea, his comments could not be found in a review of news archives on newspapers.com.
‘Ted didn’t want the Braves to share’
But de Guardiola’s daughter, Lourdes, said she attended Braves games in West Palm Beach with Turner and her father in the 1980s and early 1990s. And she said she remembers them talking about their vision for a ballpark within a community.
“Ted Turner didn’t want the Braves to share a stadium with anybody anymore. My dad was like, ‘Well, let’s go build our own,’” she recalled.
Turner nurtured “the idea and the original fire underneath my father to go find the land and find a place where they could build a spring training complex,” she said.
“My dad grew up in Cuba,” she said, “so his love for baseball was deep and very very passionate. For him to be able to be a part of something like that is how (the idea) also grew.
“And my father, from developing Wellington, already had the urban planning mindset, and Jupiter did not have an area like that, a downtown area. My father basically wanted to do another Wellington in that area but make spring training the hub of it.”
Turner ‘not directly involved, but definitely in the background’
When he joined the baseball task force in August 1992, de Guardiola traveled to Atlanta with Graham and Marcus to meet with Braves and TBS officials. Turner did not attend the meetings, Graham and Marcus said. But the visitors persuaded the team to give city and county leaders an exclusive negotiating window.
In February 1993, Braves General Manager John Schuerholz and Carl “Bunky” Helfrich, president of Turner Broadcasting Systems Properties Inc., took a helicopter tour of the county to get a better idea of major roads and population centers.
The Braves would choose a site in consultation with Turner, Helfrich told reporters. Sites in Boca Raton, Wellington, West Palm Beach and Jupiter were in contention.
Helfrich, a childhood friend of Turner’s, told a reporter that Turner’s friendship with mall magnate Mel Simon, who owned Quantum Corporate Park in Boynton Beach, would not weigh in the decision.
But Turner’s friendship with de Guardiola would end up playing a pivotal role.
“The only one I knew that Ted connected with directly was George,” said Dale Smith, at the time director of Florida operations for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which owned the 2,000 acres off Donald Ross Road that became Abacoa.
“Ted was not directly involved (in the county negotiations), but he definitely was in the background,” said Smith, who is retired in Knoxville, Tenn. “And he and George had some private conversations that I was not privy to during that period.”
‘They couldn’t talk to Ted Turner without me’
During spring training 1993, Turner hosted a cocktail party at PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens. In a conversation with de Guardiola and Helfrich, he brought up the 10-year-old idea for the mixed-use community anchored by a stadium, the developer told The Post.
Within days, de Guardiola pitched the concept to Smith at the MacArthur Foundation. Smith passed the idea on to the foundation’s brass in Chicago and got their approval.
Before long — and unbeknownst to the other members of the baseball task force — de Guardiola was having secret talks with TBS, the Braves and MacArthur about a ballpark community in Jupiter.
In June 1993, de Guardiola went public and announced plans for a mixed-use development with a Braves stadium and a Florida Atlantic University campus on MacArthur land in northern Palm Beach County. It was the outline of what would become Abacoa.
Rival developers were not happy. They accused de Guardiola of using his role on the task force for his personal advantage, charges de Guardiola denied.
“A conflict of interest is when someone uses a position to gain influence,” he told The Post. “I didn’t need the task force to talk to Ted Turner. They couldn’t talk to Ted Turner without me.”
A letter from Turner
The venture needed to persuade a majority of the seven county commissioners to earmark millions in tourist tax revenue to build a stadium in northern Palm Beach County, an idea resisted by commissioners representing the south end of the county.
Attempting to leverage his Turner connections, de Guardiola in August 1993 floated the possibility of TBS moving part of its operations to Jupiter and bringing jobs to help offset recent layoffs at Pratt & Whitney.
“I am continuing to have serious talks at the highest corporate level of TBS,” he told a reporter in August 1993. “TBS is very seriously considering being a part of this project.”
TBS officials never committed to bringing jobs to the Jupiter area. But after de Guardiola promised 500 jobs by 2006, commissioners tentatively agreed to increase the hotel tax from 3% to 4% to pay for the stadium.
The negotiations stalled again in 1994 because of questions about the joint venture’s financial backing for the housing, office and commercial development surrounding the ballpark.
Meanwhile, West Palm Beach was refusing to ante up for the Expos’ request for their own ballpark. In fall 1994, as a baseball strike canceled the World Series, the Braves reluctantly agreed to entertain the idea of sharing the new Jupiter stadium with the Expos.
In February 1995, the Braves called on retired home run slugger Hank Aaron, who lived in West Palm Beach, to meet with county commissioners and sign autographs for county staff.
That same month, Turner sent county officials what The Post described as a vaguely worded letter hinting, but not specifically pledging, that a Jupiter stadium would be “a step” toward some type of permanent TBS presence in the county.
‘One telephone call with Ted Turner’
Two months later, during another snarl in negotiations, the Braves contacted Disney for the first time about a potential move. The talks went nowhere — Disney was in negotiations with another team — but set the framework for future talks.
The Braves won the World Series in October 1995. Two months later, they reached a tentative agreement on a 20-year lease with the Expos at a county-financed $25 million stadium in Jupiter starting in 1998.
It felt like the project was rounding third and heading for home.
But in February 1996, the deal came unglued because of financial disputes between the Braves, de Guardiola and the MacArthur Foundation over the mixed-use project surrounding the planned stadium.
Frustrated by the constant ups and downs, the Braves balked and reignited their negotiations with Disney. Some county officials still thought all sides could work out their differences and that the Disney talks were only attempts by the Braves to seek leverage.
They thought wrong.
“Braves Going To Disney” screamed the banner headline over a Post story on Feb. 28, 1996, about the team’s decision to leave West Palm.
The following night, Braves players and staff kept their commitment to attend the West Palm chamber’s annual baseball dinner at the Omni Hotel on Belvedere Road. An angry de Guardiola refused to sit at his assigned table with Schuerholz and asked the chamber to seat the Braves’ general manager somewhere else.
Bill Pruitt, the chamber president at the time, broke the tension in his opening remarks as emcee when he turned to Schuerholz.
“Last year in spring training when we said, ‘Go Braves,’ we didn’t want you guys to take that literally,” Pruitt said to nervous laughter.
At a news conference a few days later, Disney CEO Michael Eisner made clear who was calling the shots in the deal.
“The Atlanta Braves (decision to move) was one telephone call with Ted Turner,” he said.
‘Out of the blue’
One day not long after the Braves announced their Disney plans, a stranger walked into de Guardiola’s office on Military Trail just north of Donald Ross Road.
“I heard the Braves aren’t coming,” the man said, according to Alex de Guardiola, the late developer’s son.
The developer, still miffed with the Braves and in no mood to chat, replied, “Yeah, what do you want?”
“My name is Bill DeWitt and I own the St Louis Cardinals and I would like to bring them here to Jupiter.”
DeWitt had heard the news about the Braves’ move to Disney and traveled to Jupiter from St. Louis to show that the Cardinals were serious about setting up shop in Abacoa.
“My dad said he just walked right into his office out of the blue,” recalled Alex, who served as Braves batboy in the early 1990s at West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium and remembers his father having dinner with Turner and Aaron.
“My dad snapped up and said, ‘OK, lets’ do it!’”
‘A tremendous idea guy’
By October 1996, Turner gave up control of the Braves as part of the $7.5 billion TBS merger with Time Warner.
When the Abacoa stadium opened in 1998, all eyes were on Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire and his pursuit of Roger Maris’ single-season home run record, all but erasing for local baseball fans the sting of the Braves’ about-face a few years earlier.
The Braves’ Disney honeymoon didn’t last long. A year or two later, when the Braves came to Jupiter for a spring game, Schuerholz told a local official he wished the team never left Palm Beach County.
When the Braves played in West Palm, they were a big deal. When they went to Disney, they were just another ride.
The Braves wound up leaving Disney after the 2018 spring and began play a year later in North Port, between Sarasota and Fort Myers— but only after briefly flirting with a plan to play at a new stadium at John Prince Memorial Park west of Lake Worth Beach.
While many longtime baseball fans still miss the Braves, they’re thrilled with the county’s status today as the premier Grapefruit League hub.
“I think Ted definitely deserves some credit,” said Pruitt, who marveled at how Turner and de Guardiola nurtured the idea that became Abacoa.
“For whatever flaws Ted may have had, he was certainly a tremendous idea guy. If the two of them getting their heads together generated that, it proved that it worked. It’s a tremendous boon to this area.”
Editor’s note: Stet News reporters Joe Capozzi and Joel Engelhardt, who edited this story, were Palm Beach Post colleagues covering the new stadium and the Braves negotiations in the 1990s.
