Tony Schiavone

Name	Tony Schiavone
Names	Tony Schiavone
Height
Weight
Birth date	November 07, 1957
Birth place	Craigsville, Virginia
Debut	1983
Retired	2003

Noah Anthony "Tony" Schiavone (born on November 7, 1957) Schiavone owns his own radio production company, Blind Dog Sports.

After a few years of work with the Braves system including pre-game and post-game radio coverage, and also spot duty as an official scorer for games, Schiavone returned to play-by-play duties on radio when the Gwinnett Braves began their first season in Lawrenceville, Georgia as Atlanta's AAA-level affiliate for the 2009-10 season.

Georgia Bulldogs Football Radio Show

Along with being a writer for the Georgia Bulldogs Radio Network, Schiavone also works one of the post game game talk show's on the Georgia Bulldogs Radio Network for home and away games alongside former University of Georgia quarterback David Greene.

Criticism

During his tenure with WCW, Schiavone developed a reputation for both his over-the-top announcing style and his relentless shilling of the WCW product itself; he was well-known for proclaiming any particular Nitro broadcast to be "the greatest (moment/night/event) in the history of our sport!" However, when this extreme hyperbole was repeated on a weekly basis throughout the duration of the Monday Night Wars, the phrase itself lost meaning and became a target of mockery by Schiavone's detractors. '

A famous incident Schiavone is tied to came on the January 4, 1999 edition of Nitro. That week, Nitro was airing live against a pre-taped edition of WWF RAW IS WAR on USA and was to feature a rematch between WCW World Heavyweight Champion Kevin Nash and Goldberg from Starrcade, where Nash had ended Goldberg's undefeated streak and taken his title under controversial circumstances, as well as the first appearance of Hollywood Hogan since he announced his "retirement" from professional wrestling on the Thanksgiving 1998 edition of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Meanwhile, RAW was to feature Mick Foley, who was wrestling as Mankind at the time and had previously wrestled for nearly five years with WCW, win his first WWF Championship in a Survivor Series rematch against The Rock. However, since the World Wrestling Federation's practice of broadcasting a live episode of RAW IS WAR every other Monday and recording the next week's show every other Tuesday was still in effect, with the rise of the Internet it was possible to know the results of the following week's RAW simply by searching one of the many wrestling news sites that were available online at the time. It was also a practice that WCW had used to its advantage previously, where WCW Executive Vice President Eric Bischoff would use his position as lead broadcaster for Nitro to spoil pre-taped RAW episodes and not give fans reasons to change the channel to watch the WWF's show. However, by this time Bischoff had long removed himself from the broadcast booth and WCW had not resorted to spoiling the competition's programming.

According to Foley, who remarked about the incident in the first chapter of his book Foley Is Good (and the Real World is Faker than Wrestling), this was to be a pivotal night for WCW as people believed that WCW, whose record streak of 84 consecutive wins in the ratings had been snapped by RAW in April 1998 and had only eight head-to-head wins after that, would turn the ratings tide back to them and potentially take over the lead in the so-called Monday Night Wars. During the show Schiavone spoiled the result of RAW's main event by saying that Foley would win, sarcastically remarking "That'll put a lot of butts in seats". In fact, Schiavone made several references to Foley's win during the course of the three-hour Nitro.

Foley was genuinely upset by what he had heard and telephoned Schiavone to let him know. When Schiavone called Foley back, he told Foley that Bischoff had ordered Schiavone to reveal his title win over the air. The strategy backfired on Bischoff in two ways. First, almost immediately after Schiavone spoiled Foley's title win, 500,000 households switched from TNT, the network airing Nitro, to USA, RAWs home, to watch Foley win the title. This was enough to give the WWF the ratings win for the night, with a 5.7 final rating to Nitro's 5.0, vindicating Foley. WCW's ratings never saw more than a 5.0 going head-to-head with RAW again and Nitro's rating quickly sank below 5 and by the end of the year was struggling to stay above 3.0. RAW, in the meantime, continued to gain viewers and built up a huge lead.

In an RF Video Shoot interview, Schiavone was criticized by Bobby Heenan who claimed that Schiavone would allegedly hide finishes and angles from him and Mike Tenay during broadcasts, claiming Schiavone's key to life is "knowledge is power". This was an opinion shared by long-time wrestling broadcaster "Mean Gene" Okerlund who claimed that, while he liked Schiavone and did not have many problems with him, "Tony was the consummate politician" and "Tony watched out for Tony and in doing so, had a tendency to bury people along the way".

References

External links

Noah Schiavone

Tony Schiavone's Online World Of Wrestling Profile

Category:American radio sports announcers Category:American sports radio personalities Category:American sportspeople of Italian descent Category:James Madison University alumni Category:Baseball announcers Category:People from Atlanta, Georgia Category:Professional wrestling announcers Category:1957 births Category:Living people Category:People from Augusta County, Virginia