Tony Schiavone On What He Wants To Do When He Retires From Announcing

In the latest episode of What Happened When (via Fightful), Tony Schiavone said he wanted to keep working backstage after he has retired from an announcer in wrestling. He currently has a backstage role in AEW as Senior Producer, Special Advisor, and Talent Relations.

He said: ““I’d still want to work backstage. I’d like to have a baseball bat and whack guys in the ass with it when they wouldn’t get their work done. Which I kinda got now. I’d like to do kind of what I’m doing now, and that is work in talent relations. Because I think I know how to handle people, and I do. It’s a very, very tricky job in wrestling to work in talent relations. I’m not the only one who works in talent relations, there’s like three of us. It’s a very tricky job because you have to, everybody’s different, you have to approach people differently, you have to be receptive to their ideas, and you have to kind of be sympathetic to their feelings. Right now, I handle every gripe and complaint that a wrestler has now, kind of goes through me and I try to settle it as best I can. If it ends up between two wrestlers, we probably need to go over my head with it or get other people involved. But I like dealing with talent, I really, really do. I think part of that is because the talent that I’m dealing with now all kind of watched me as they were going up, so they have a respect for me. I don’t get it, but they do, and it helps me with my job. So I really like talent relations. Now talent relations is nothing like what JR was doing. Because JR was doing payoffs, contracts and shit like that. I’m just kind of like babysitting, but I like that.“