Tony Nese prides himself on putting people over.
The All Elite Wrestling star has captured a number of championships throughout his career, but his eyes aren’t always on the gold. In a recent appearance on AEW Unrestricted, the “Premier Athlete” opened up about his main goal in the sport. “I pride myself on getting the other guy a reaction. That’s always been my goal,” he said. “That’s what I love and that’s what I just feel I’m good at. I’ve always been like that, when I’m good at something, I get more and more passionate about it. So that’s just something I always push to do and try to do.”
Nese continued, citing his two least favorite crowd chants in wrestling, that go against his mindset. “I wouldn’t say I hate them, but it’s ‘Fight Forever’ and ‘Both These Guys,'” he revealed. “It’s not a knock on anyone who gets that chant, in my opinion, it’s ‘Well, now you don’t care who wins.’ 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, they hate me. When I see that, it’s job well done.”
With a goal to make people “despise his existence on the show,” Nese note an example that “got him spinning. “My wife’s a casual fan, right? She just watches because I have the watch. I say, I have to watch, [I mean], because I watch. Every time Vickie Guerrero comes out with ‘excuse me,’ my wife is always like, ‘God, I cannot stand this lady. Someone please shut her up.’ But that’s it. That’s the reaction you want. I want people to always say, ‘Please, someone just put Tony Nese out of his misery’, you know? That’s the reaction I always go for.”
As a heel on AEW programming, Nese often draws heat from the crowd through his work. Alongside manager “Smart” Mark Sterling and partner Josh Woods, the trio formed The Varsity Athletes. Although the three purposely string out boos in their on-screen performances, Tony Nese revealed Sterling and Woods are actually “funny in their own way” off-screen.
“Mark is unintentionally funny, where Josh, he’s definitely trying to be funny, but he is funny,” Nese said. He’s very quirky. He always says ridiculous [stuff]. Any idea we come up with, he takes it to the next level. He’s that guy. So he’s always going to keep taking that whatever — because we’ll come up with funny ideas. That’s just the wrestler’s thing. Any idea you come up with, no matter how serious, somehow it snowballs into a funny idea, all the time.”
“I don’t know why we always go to the comedy direction, but Josh will always make it more and more ridiculous. So he’s funny in that way. Mark is just literally what you see, is that dorky dad, you know? Some of the things he’ll just say unintentionally is just super funny. So they’re kind of they’re kind of both funny in their own way. That’s my dad answer.”
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