AEW News: Veteran Reportedly Turned Down WWE To Join Company
The arrival of All Elite Wrestling has made the wrestling business a more competitive place. With another major company on the scene, WWE isn’t the be-all and end-all for talent looking for gainful employment within the industry. Now, with two major companies competing for talent, sports entertainment is going to be unpredictable and exciting moving forward.
AEW is out to become a force in the wrestling game, and the roster is really beginning to take shape. The company has recruited some impressive in-ring competitors, on-air personalities and backstage producers so far, with a healthy mix of fresh talent and experienced figures already providing a strong foundation for the company to build upon.
Citing Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Sportskeeda reports that the latest personality to join the growing AEW is the legendary Tony Schiavone, who most wrestling fans will remember as the voice of World Championship Wrestling during the Monday Night Wars.
By joining AEW, Schiavone joins the legendary Jim Ross behind the announcer’s desk. Whether or not both commentators feature alongside each other or rotate duties on the shows remains to be seen. However, by recruiting two of the most recognizable voices in the business, AEW has some strong options in that department to choose from.
According to Meltzer, the veteran commentator also refused an offer from WWE to join the new upstart promotion.
“They (WWE) were in talks in the last week with Tony Schiavone. Tony thought that in the way he left WWE, whatever it was like 20…when did he leave WWE? That’s like in the 90s, so what 25 years ago? He thought that the way he left, he could never go back and then they were like clamouring for him. They had no interest in him when WCW went down. There was no interest in bringing in Tony Schiavone into WWF and they never did.”
As noted by Sportskeeda, Schiavone left WWE in 1989 in controversial fashion. After parting ways with Vince McMahon’s company, the WWE chairman was furious with the announcer and never reached out to him about returning to the company when he bought WCW.
Update: Tony Schiavone will continue to work with MLW and chose AEW over a return to WWE:https://t.co/NnooqP09Gr
— WrestleTalk News (@WrestleTalk_TV) August 19, 2019
Schiavone has since stated that he’s always regretted his decision to leave WWE, but he claims that there hasn’t been any problems between him and his former boss since then. Now that he’s rejected WWE to join the biggest threat to the company’s business interests, they probably won’t become best friends any time soon.
