What Ted Turner allegedly said to Tony Schiavone in the men’s bathroom after WWE bought WCW
While speaking on his podcast, AEW announcer and former World Championship Wrestling announcer Tony Schiavone shared a story about former WCW owner Ted Turner from after WWE purchased WCW…
“So, when WCW went down in 2001, I’ve mentioned on this podcast before that I immediately, that day, got a job part-time at WSB, which has been one of the legendary stations in the Atlanta market. And they had been the home of the Atlanta Braves forever.
So now I’m working for WSB part-time. I’m working their sports department, and that means I get a chance to do their Atlanta Braves pregame and postgame show on the Braves radio network, along with two other guys. Three of us kind of rotated through.
So now the game is getting ready to start, so I’m going back up to the press box. I go outside in the concourse underneath—nobody around. There’s a men’s bathroom, women’s bathroom. I have to go to the bathroom.
I go across to the men’s bathroom, and I go up to the urinal, and there’s only two of us in the bathroom. And I look to my right—the other guy who’s peeing is Ted Turner.
So I say, ‘Mr. Turner’—of course after zipping up—I say, ‘Mr. Turner, I know you don’t know who I am, but I’m Tony Schiavone, and I did WCW—World Championship Wrestling—and started in ’85 on TBS, and I’ve been doing WCW Monday Nitro and WCW Thunder…’
And that’s about all I got out.
And he said—I remember vividly—the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Those motherf*ckers. If I was still running this place, wrestling would still be on TBS. It would still be on TNT.’
He said, ‘They are out of their minds taking off wrestling, which has been an integral part of what we’re doing.’
I remember walking out of that and saying, ‘Wow, what an impromptu meeting that was.’
So it told me that he was very upset with what AOL Time Warner was doing right then. And it also told me that had Ted still been in charge of the company, we would have still been on the air.”