(FORTUNE Magazine) – Sounds like media mogul Ted Turner, 53, isn't the easiest of dads. His son Robert Edward ''Teddy'' Turner IV, 28, the second of Turner's five children from two marriages, says he's not asking for fatherly assistance in financing his boat in a 32,000-mile round-the-world race in 1993. Says Teddy: ''I wouldn't. Everything he gets involved in, he absorbs. It becomes a Ted Turner project. Well, this is a Teddy Turner project.'' Dad, who controls Turner Broadcasting System, parent of CNN, and Atlanta's Braves (baseball) and Hawks (basketball), could claim expertise. He skippered Courageous to victory in the 1977 America's Cup. Son Teddy is wooing corporations into ponying up some $16 million to buy a boat to enter in the Whitbread, as the race is called. The boat will be named for the sponsor. As bait, Teddy has taken some 25 CEOs, including Ralph Larsen of Johnson & Johnson and Frank Cahouet of Mellon Bank, out on his 79-foot practice boat, Challenge America, in which he ''invested'' his $700,000 trust fund.

Teddy started tagging along on practice runs on his dad's boats at 5, shortly after his father and his mother, Jane Nye, divorced. The son recalls, ''We had a lot of steps in my family -- stepmothers, stepbrothers. Sailing was my world; it was my escape.'' In 1985, after earning a business degree from the Citadel military academy in Charleston, South Carolina, he went to work as a cameraman for CNN's Moscow bureau. He returned to Atlanta in 1987 as a special-projects manager at TBS Productions. Says Turner: ''That didn't work out too well; my dad isn't the person to work for.'' The boss's son lost out on promotions and quit the family firm two years later, working in sales at a non-Turner cable TV station in Nashville until 1990. Since then Teddy, who lives in Charleston, has been fund raising for his Whitbread bid.