Tony Nese chats his 205 Live run in WWE and his AEW debut match against Sammy Guevara.
Tony Nese is a member of the All Elite Wrestling roster and his signing was announced in early December, prior to his TNT Title match against current champion Sammy Guevara.
Since 2016, Nese was under the WWE umbrella as a member of the cruiserweight division. He reflected on those days while speaking to Joey G. of Wrestling Headlines. As 205 Live routinely became a fixture within WWE’s content rollout, members of 205 Live began to film a YouTube series titled ‘205 Life’, where they would document themselves on the road. Nese shared that WWE told them to stop filming and putting their videos out.
We were doing that show ‘The 205 Life.’ We had our own little YouTube show about 205 Live. Social media is getting big, we see how [Xavier] Woods is doing big things with UpUpDownDown, and everything so we’re like, ‘Let’s create something of our own where everyone can kind of see us in our everyday lives.’ How the cruiserweights hang out together on the road and all that stuff. Really great concept, but the problem was we got we got shut down by the company so they were like, ‘Hey, you guys got to stop filming this stuff and put it out.’ We did have a lot of like backstage stuff and everything. But anyway, so that’s a side note. So I did say on it, we had to create a WrestleMania entrance, and this was this was before I did Mania [35], but obviously I wasn’t going to get this entrance. Yeah, the idea was that I don’t remember it word for word, but I do know that the idea is I come out. And as I’m doing the ab count, you know, we have fireworks going off…eight times. First my music plays, it starts off with a chorus, because my song was like, ‘Whoa,’ right? So we actually have like, you know, some high end New York chorus. And they’re doing that part for a while and then it starts to break out into the guitar part and I’m coming down… ascending from the heavens, I’m coming down on this, this whatever they use, crane or whatever. And as I’m coming down, the light shines on just me. And that’s when I start the ab count. And we got fireworks each time I counted or whatever. Yeah, so I believe that was the idea of the entrance. And honestly, I just want to say, you know, AEW might have the budget for this. I would say in WWE, there was 100% chance that would never happen, right? I’d say in AEW, there might be a 10% chance that that could happen.
205 Live was often taped after SmackDown. Nese said his fellow 205 Live roster members and those backstage felt that it should’ve been taped prior to SmackDown. He said it came down to one person feeling that because the show name had ‘Live’ in it, it needed to be occur live.
Yep. Listen, you are preaching to the choir, we literally and I would say 99.9999% of everyone backstage felt the same way. It really just came down to one man saying, ‘It says Live in the title. It’s got to be live.’ And I mean, you could just guess who the hell I’m talking about.
Nese fell in defeat to Guevara in their TNT Title match. He’s critical of himself but received positive feedback from AEW President Tony Khan about his performance. Nese went on to speak highly of Guevara’s in-ring ability and the improvements Guevara has made since they last crossed paths.
I should say I’m very critical of myself. So it’s hard for me to be like, ‘Oh, I killed it.’ Like, I never really talked like that. But I’m definitely hoping from the response I got. Also from the response I got from Tony. He later that week contacted me to let me know how much he enjoyed it and everything so I definitely think I did a very good job in the debut. That’s always the biggest thing too is like, ‘Man, this is a clean slate here. Don’t mess this up.’ But you know what, also, Sammy is…He’s excellent. He’s on a roll right now. He can’t have a bad match. That always helps you going into it. Like, ‘All right, listen, I know what I’m doing. He knows what he’s doing.’ I don’t know if you know this, but we’ve done this before. I actually wrestled him in Texas at WrestleCircus years before when he was just about to break out. He was becoming like the new local star. And then yeah, we had that magic. I mean, and it was…it was great back then. He was awesome back then. But now you can see the huge differences. You know how much more advanced he’s gotten based off of work and all these different things. As soon as someone builds up, that’s kind of how it works. They start to get in the ring with more with guys who can teach them better. It’s always a learning process. You can’t go to a school, learn everything and then you’re going to be the greatest, right? You’re gonna learn by getting in the ring with the greatest.
The latest name to join the AEW roster is Keith Lee and he scored a win over Isiah Kassidy in his debut. To hear POST Wrestling’s thoughts about Lee’s debut, head over to this link.
