Tony Schiavone Details His Last-Minute ROH Debut At ROH Final Battle

Tony Schiavone describes how his ROH debut came together at the last minute.

Tony Schiavone is a legendary broadcaster, and he had a lengthy run with WCW. He has also worked for WWF and MLW. In recent years, he has been featured in AEW. However, until ROH Final Battle, Schiavone had never appeared on ROH programming. That changed when he interviewed Bryan Keith backstage at the show.

Shayna Baszler Advances To Quarterfinals Of Queen Of The Ring Tournament

Speaking on What Happened When, Tony Schiavone discussed his debut and noted that it happened at the last minute.

“I’m backstage. I think the Zero Hour had already started, and Sonjay comes by me. He says, ‘Have you checked your texts?’ I went, ‘No.’ We got these text threads. I don’t know why I didn’t check it because I check it all the time. It said, it was from Sonjay, Sonjay said, ‘Tony wants you to do an interview on this pay-per-view.’ I went, ‘God…’ It’s not that I don’t want to do it, it’s just like, okay, what is it gonna be about? So I gotta rush around. I don’t have a Ring of Honor jacket. I just have an AEW jacket. I don’t think that’s appropriate. I go to see out buddy Clint, one of our costume designers, and he said, ‘Well, I’ve got a jacket. I think it’ll fit you, and I’ll put a Ring of Honor patch on it.’ He did, and I did the interview with Bryan Keith and Orange Cassidy to set up the match. So it was the first time I’d ever been on Ring of Honor. How about that? Last-minute type shit [laughs]. I made my Ring of Honor debut when Bobby Cruise was the ringer announcer on his twentieth Ring of Honor [Final Battle]," Schiavone said.

Schiavone recently stated that he thinks Vince McMahon wanted to hire him just to fire him in 2019. Check out his comments here.

Fightful will have live coverage of AEW Dynamite as it airs on December 20.

If you use any of the quotes above, please credit the original source with a h/t and link back to Fightful for the transcription.

Get exclusive pro wrestling content on Fightful Select, our premium news service! Click here to learn more.