What Happened When’s Tony Schiavone had an exclusive conversation with WrestleZone’s Dominic DeAngelo ahead of his appearance at Chicago’s C2E2 event.
In this second part of the hour-long chat, Tony and Dominic talk about Schiavone’s current status with MLW. Tony’s been one of the main voices for the company for over the course of 2018 and his current schedule with baseball and basketball announcing conflicts to MLW’s recent day change. Tony talks about that as well as the great work Court Bauer and his crew do at getting the production aspect done right for a wrestling company. Quotes are below with more transcriptions to follow:
Tony Schiavone on his current status with MLW:
Yeah, I can talk about it. I’m in the midst of the contract with them. I signed a three-year deal with them and in the contract it said that if I have baseball or if I have Georgia basketball or Georgia football that that would take precedent. Well when we first started doing this they had their tapings on Thursdays which was no problem, especially no problem with football and basketball because basically, we play football every Saturday. Basketball we play Wednesdays and Saturdays or Tuesdays and Saturdays, very rarely do we play on Wednesdays. And then in 2019, Court sent me the entire schedule and everything was on a Saturday with the exception of right before WrestleMania, they’re going to record on a Thursday and a Friday. Well in April they’re taping in New York on April 4th and April 5th. That’s the opening day of baseball season for me, April 4th is. So I got in touch with Court and I said, “Listen with the exception of one day in the month of June, I can’t do these.” And they started doing live shows now. There were some times where back we would shoot the shows and then we would go somewhere else and do the commentary later. We would post the commentary later because I wasn’t available, but now that they’re doing live shows they need to bring in an announce team to do those live shows, I’m not available. So it really looks like that I’m not going to be doing it for a whole year. I don’t know what 2020’s gonna be for them, but it looks like I’m going to go a whole year without doing it. So it’s fine with me, I got plenty to do. They got Jim Cornette doing it now which I understand he’s doing a great job which I know he would and Rich Boccini is a great announcer. Matt Stryker is a great announcer and I told Court, “Listen, you let those guys do it. You’ve got fine announcers. You don’t need me. I’ve got plenty to do.” And so that’s where we are right now.”
On Court Bauer’s top-notch production team:
He’s got a good team. He’s put together some very, very good people who have done wrestling before and people who have worked in the WWE/WWF for years works with him and good post-production people, good cameramen, good director and to me that was always the backbone of wrestling. You could have great wrestlers, but if your TV show didn’t look good, people weren’t going to migrate to it and I think his show looks good. I think they do a good job at putting together his show. And so I think he should be commended for that. I think they’re doing a great job.
Plenty more to come from this candid conversation with Tony, including discussions about Terry Funk, “Bullet” Bob Armstrong, Chris Jericho, AEW and much, much more.
