Tony Schiavone - Controversy

Controversy

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. He was well known for proclaiming many Nitro broadcasts to be "the greatest", or "most explosive", telecast "in the history of our sport." However, when this over-the-top hyperbole was repeated on a weekly basis throughout the Monday Night Wars, the phrase lost meaning and became a target of mockery by Schiavone's detractors.

An infamous incident Schiavone happened on the January 4, 1999, Nitro. Nitro was airing live against the pre-taped WWF Raw is War on USA Network 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 for WCW as Cactus Jack, win his first WWF Championship in a rematch against The Rock. However, Raw is War was taped and Nitro was live, and it was a practice for WCW and executive producer Eric Bischoff to spoil pre-taped Raw episodes, by telling the WCW audience the results of the Raw show, and not give fans reasons to change the channel.

According to Foley, who wrote 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 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 talk about it. When Schiavone called Foley back, he told Foley that Bischoff had ordered Schiavone to reveal his title win over the air. The strategy, however, backfired on Bischoff . Almost immediately after Schiavone spoiled Foley's title win, 600,000 households switched from Nitro to Raw, 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. WCW's ratings never saw more than a 5.0 going head-to-head with Raw again and Nitro's rating sank below 5 and by the end of the year was struggling to stay above 3.0.

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". One tense incident happened on the Nitro following the death of Heenan's longtime best friend Gorilla Monsoon. Heenan was allowed to say a word of honor for Monsoon albeit only a small statement. Word has it that Schiavone was against any mention of Monsoon on the show and Heenan resented him for it. Later on in the show when Schiavone asked for Heenan's opinion on an upcoming tag team match Heenan responded, "I can't hear you from way down here", in tears, before the camera cut away.