AEW commentator Tony Schiavone appeared on WTVR CBS 6’s Virginia This Morning to discuss various topics, including his beginnings in wrestling during the 1980s.
Schiavone said, “I mean, it’s a long story. I wanted to be a baseball announcer. That was my dream. And when I graduated from James Madison, they hired me to do their football play-by-play out of college, and I turned it down because I wanted to do baseball, and I got a job in baseball. And just so happens that my second job in baseball happened to be with the Crockett family that ran Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, that was seen right here on Channel 6 on Saturdays, and so I got into wrestling, and I think i was very fortunate in that time that I got in because not many people wanted to be a wrestling announcer at that time.”
On the 18-year period where he left wrestling from 2001 to 2019:
“It took off, and I was on TBS. My first job was working on the TV studios in 1985. Now. And then I just stayed with it. There was 18 years, though. I didn’t do wrestling. When the Richmond Braves left here and went to metro Atlanta became the voice of the Gwinnett Braves, their play-by-play on the radio for 11 years. Georgia football and did some morning radio, and then came back to wrestling and 2019. Everything that was part of my ambition I was able to do, so I’ve been very lucky.”
On refusing a writer’s pitch to have Tank Abbott punch him in the midsection:
“I’ve never been really beaten up. There was one time that one of our writers — this was years ago. This was back in the — I guess maybe — years ago. And he said, ‘I’d like this wrestler to punch you in the midsection.’ And the wrestler at that time was a wrestler named Tank Abbott, who also had been a UFC fighter, and he was known to be pretty stiff. And I said, ‘Absolutely not, no. Anybody else, but I don’t want him to hit me.’”
