The most recent episode of the “AEW Unrestricted” podcast features an interview with Tony Nese, during which he discussed how Mark Sterling came to be his manager:
“When I first started, this was probably like, week two, week three in or whatever, a lot of the guys from Long Island, you know, we all know each other, so we all hang out. So I’d always sit with Mark and all the other guys and stuff. He was mentioning, ‘Man, I’d love to also manage a male wrestler’, because he was at the time he’s working with Jade and everything. He’s loving it, but he’s very limited to what he can do because it is the women’s division and stuff. He was kind of like, ‘Oh, man. I want to work in the male division because I want to get beat up by everyone.”
“We started talking about it. I always thought that I would be presented better with a manager and everything as well. So I was like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s talk to Tony and let’s tell him.’ He was actually a little bit like, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m doing a thing right now and I don’t want to step on any eggshells, whatever it is.’ I was like, ‘Listen, I’ll go talk to him, but if I go in there by myself, he’s gonna think that I’m just trying to create ideas for myself, whatever it is. If we go in there together, he’s gonna see that we both agree on this, we both like it, and we’re passionate about it.’ So I grabbed him and I said, ‘I’ll do all the talking.’ We went in there and that was it. We talked to Tony. He saw that we were both excited about it. He’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ So now we just keep constantly pitching ideas like, ‘Hey, how can we screw up this guy or this guy’s run? How can we pull the rug out from underneath from this person’ and then in the end, give it right back to them and just have Mark somehow get destroyed. That’s how we plan everything. It’s been so much fun. Adding Mark has been such a great spark to my career in AEW.”
Tony Nese expressed displeasure with the crowd’s chant of “Fight forever”:
“It’s not a knock on anyone who gets that chant, but like, in my opinion it’s, well now you don’t care who wins, and I want people to literally want me to lose. I love the hate that I get a lot of times from people, especially like Twitter and stuff like that, like they hate me. When I see that, it’s like, it’s a job well done. I want people to absolutely despise my existence on the show.”
Nese stated that he is a huge fan of Chris Jericho:
“I’ve never even said this to Jericho, but he’s my absolute favorite. He was my legend. He was my hero growing up and everything. It specifically takes me back to one vivid memory when Jericho won the championship from Triple H to open RAW, and then later that night to lose it back to him was literally the amount of emotions I went through in that, what was it, two hours at that time? The emotions I went through. I remember going crazy calling my friend up, like, ‘Oh, my God, did you see what happened?’ Like, I’m so excited, and then as the show went on, you start to realize things aren’t going so right and then he loses it at the end. I couldn’t eat. The next day at school, no one could talk to me. I was so upset.”
“That’s just a memory in my head of like, man, like, that’s wrestling to me, those emotions, whether you’re angry, whether you’re excited, and so like, that brought out the most emotions in me than anything else I’ve ever watched. From that moment, I was like, I’m gonna ride or die with Jericho. I’m gonna invest all my money in Jericho things, and I’m going to invest in his career. So he was always kind of a hero to me.”
“Then reading his books as well, or actually, like when I started training is when he came out with his first book. I’d read that all the time. I’d always spend an hour or so reading before I drove out to wrestling and it just kind of got my mindset of like, hell yeah. I’m gonna go and I’m gonna make a freakin awesome career myself and stuff like that. I’ve never told him this. I haven’t had too many long conversations with him because I’m like, I’m actually that superfan. Like anytime I’m around if he says something to me, I’m just like that awkward, I give a response that doesn’t even make sense, type of thing.”
You can listen to the complete podcast below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
