He attended James Madison University in Virginia and served in a play-by-play role for the school's women's college basketball team before starting his radio and television career calling high school football and basketball games in the Southeast. He also worked five years in minor league baseball with the New York Yankees and Baltimore Orioles' minor league franchises in the mid-Atlantic.

While affiliated with the Orioles' affiliate in Charlotte, he began as a wrestling announcer with Jim Crockett's Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling (later known as Jim Crockett Promotions, the precursor to World Championship Wrestling or WCW) in the early 1980s. When Jim Crockett Promotions got national television exposure on TBS Superstation in 1985, he was a regular host of the wrestling program. He was signed by Vince McMahon's WWF for a stint in 1989, but soon returned to Jim Crockett Promotions, now called WCW and owned by media mogul Ted Turner.

Schiavone is remembered as the voice of WCW for most of the 1990s, right up until the company's demise in 2001. He was also a producer and had a spot on WCW's diverse booking team. Many feel the quality of his work as an announcer fell dramatically as the quality of the promotion's product fell, and Schiavone became known (and often mocked) for his hyperbolic "greatest match/night in the history of our sport" calls. However, reports at the time and details unearthed after WCW's sale to the WWF indicate that Schiavone himself was displeased at the company's lack of programming quality, and that the WCW production team frequently gave him material of which he disapproved.

Schiavone was often called a "company man" behind the scenes, as he remained with WCW throughout the tenures of Jim Herd, Kip Allen Frey, Bill Watts, Eric Bischoff, Bill Busch, Vince Russo, and others. From late 1995 through mid-1996, he hosted the first hour of the company's flagship show on TNT, WCW Monday Nitro, and eventually hosted both hours during the early run of the New World Order. Schiavone also did most of the WCW pay-per-view events and hosted WCW's Thursday show, Thunder, and Saturday show, WCW Saturday Night, both of which were broadcast on TBS Superstation.

During the "Monday Night Wars" between WCW Monday Nitro and WWF RAW, WCW often used a tactic to keep its viewers tuned into Nitro that involved spoiling the results of WWF's taped television shows. On January 4, 1999, it finally backfired when Eric Bischoff instructed Schiavone to spoil the RAW main event, in which Mick Foley (as Mankind) claimed his first WWF Championship. In an infamous moment, Schiavone revealed the results and sarcastically remarked, "That'll put a lot of butts in the seats." Hundreds of thousands of viewers switched from Nitro to RAW to watch Foley win the title, on a night when WCW had been ahead in the quarter-hour ratings. In Foley's first book, he relates that Schiavone placed a phone call to him afterwards, and was very upset and apologetic about his remarks, which he said were spoken not of his own will but fed to him by Bischoff.

Schiavone also was said to have come up with the idea of putting the WCW World Championship around the waist of David Arquette (although it seems Schiavone was just making a joke and not expecting Vince Russo to take it seriously). Backstage, Schiavone had a lot of heat with the boys and fellow broadcast partners (most notably Bobby Heenan), and was said to be a closed-off person who did not interact much with anyone other than his superiors during the dying days of WCW.

While Schiavone was out of a job in wrestling when WCW was sold to the WWF in 2001, his work with Time Warner did not end. He joined the Atlanta Braves almost immediately, and began working on pre and post game shows, first on WSB and later on the Braves Radio Network after it broke from WSB in 2005. The WWE did toy with the idea of bringing him in to co-host WWE Raw while Jim Ross was fired in storyline, but Schiavone stayed loyal to Time Warner, staying with baseball.

He briefly appeared as the play-by-play commentator for Jimmy Hart's XWF promotion in 2001, and appeared in Total Nonstop Action Wrestling in early 2003 as a heel announcer associated with Sports Entertainment Xtreme, however Schiavone appeared on only one episode of TNA's then-weekly pay-per-views. These days, he co-hosts a sports talk show on Jacobs Media's SportsRadio 1240 The Ticket in Gainesville, GA, and remains on Time Warner's staff with the Braves, with some work as an official scorer for games. (Ironically, Jeff Torborg, whose son wrestled in WCW, is the current Braves television analyst.) It is uncertain if Schiavone will ever be seen at the broadcast booth with WWE, TNA, or an independent promotion such as Ring of Honor as he has been working with baseball and local radio

Schiavone and his wife Lois have been married since 1984 and have five children -- Matt, Laurie, Chris, and twin sons Jon and Tim.