I’ve never been able to figure out Ted Turner. Here’s a guy who is easily one of the world’s great wizards when it comes to running a business like CNN, winning the America’s Cup sailboat race or becoming the largest individual land owner in the United States but then – kaboom! - he’ll have a spell of “dead-dog dumb” that defies description.

I am somewhat an expert on “dead-dog dumb,” since I also take on occasional spells, so no wonder his brand-new book, “Call Me Ted,” which is the autobiography he wrote with his old CNN sidekick, Bill Burke, absolutely kept me spellbound last week. This book is the ultimate Christmas gift for any business mastermind, but far better for anybody who is now sane who longs to be crazy or visa versa.

It’s all there, about when he owned the Braves and got in trouble for playing stakes poker with his players, about his tumultuous scraps with women, and the rest. The greatest insight is to his riverboat gambler way of buying companies with very little cash and then making lots of it.

There is a glorious chapter early on about Chattanooga’s McCallie School, a place that stayed after him until he “turned the buoy,” so to speak, and it is fabulous. I had heard most of the stories, since way back then, my late father actually taught Ted in English class. The one about catching squirrels is priceless; he set an oak tree on fire with shoe polish and caught the critters in his laundry bag as they jumped to safety, winning a pile of bets.

Each chapter in Ted’s book has a little “testimonial” from someone else who was there, and the McCallie chapter has a marvelous tribute written by Rody Sherrill, who has long been one of my favorite people. Rody is the guy who got Ted to give McCallie that $20 million gift that helped build the athletic center, and his comments in the book are all flowery, but get Rody off to the side and his Ted Turner tales are side-splitting.

Understand, that isn’t bad. Not at all. But as one who got tossed out of some of the same schools as “Turner, T.” attended, I have to admit there are better stories on the greatest sailor since Christopher Columbus than the somewhat starched and pasteurized ones in the new book.

That said, the book’s best chapter, bar none, is Ted’s account of the deadly Fastnet sailboat race. He skippered his beloved “Tenacious” in that race with Gary Jobson. A terrible storm blew in, and 19 people were killed, and the tale, with seas reported at 40 feet and “mayday” calls jamming the boat’s radio, is an epic. Ted’s oldest son, Teddy, writes the testimonial for the chapter and vividly recalls his Dad yelling above the wind, “You are in control of your own situation until you give up. Do not panic or you will die.”

Jobson, the world-class sailor who was also with Turner in the America’s Cup triumph, writes of the Fastnet race, “Ted was really tough that night. I was watching him, and he was so strong I never got frightened. I thought, ‘If he’s alright then everything’s okay.’ The harder (the storm became), the better he was. I think it was his finest hour.”

So what happens? The world media went nuts, and Turner was the logical interview. So all these microphones were jammed in his tired face once they got the boat back to England, and, true to form, Ted then shocked the world when he was asked about the terrible weather.

Understand, Ted is a history buff and he’s studied the Irish Sea and its wild storms for years. He knows, for instance, that weather turned back the Spanish Armada several times back in the 1600s. So when Ted is asked about the storm, he blurted, “Don’t knock it altogether. If it hadn’t been for storms like that, you’d be speaking Spanish.”

Needless to say, some grief-stricken Fastnet survivors thought that was a little much, but it is simply Ted. He just speaks what’s on his mind.

Years ago, when he opened Chattanooga’s first cable TV office in the old Newton Chevrolet building down at Fourth and Market streets, all these people were at this lavish cocktail party and Ted said something to a lady I know he’d never seen before. Trust me, even I almost dropped my soda pop - he just says what is on his mind!

Such candor, however muffled and washed, still makes for a wonderful book, and this is one that I will give to some of my dearest friends this Christmas. It is every bit that good.

Now, after reading it, you ask my take on Ted, what makes him act nuts at times. His dad was hard on him, so hard they put him in his first boarding school at age four. If you want to kill a kid’s heart, that’s undeniably the first step – take him away from all that he loves.

The second way a kid’s heart gets smashed also happened to Ted Turner. He had a younger sister, Mary Jean, who was born, we learn, when he was three years old. He loved her deeply, but when Mary Jean was 12, she got lupus, which led to encephalitis. She was in a coma and suffered terrible brain damage – this all taking place while Ted was at McCallie.

After that, the love of his life, his sister, could do no more than roll a beach ball back to him. When he’d go home from McCallie, Mary Jean would look at him with vacant eyes and say no more than, “Ted … you are my brother” and then go bang her head again the wall. Sometimes, real late at night, he could also hear her cry, “God, please let me die!”

Well, later in the book Ted Turner’s dad turned on him, and McCallie, the Coast Guard, and the old black maintenance guys at the Turner Billboard Company finally combined to forge his backbone. So the next time “Captain Courageous” does or says something goofy, you might want to cut the guy some slack.

It’s a great book, I tell you, chock full of modern-day lessons and the tests that come with them. Sane people will enjoy it, but for guys who sometimes get a case of “dead dog dumb,” it’s evermore a classic.

royexum@aol.com