Since landing his life-changing gig on Dancing With the Stars, the ballroom pro has tangoed with a WWE beauty, a Broadway star, a TV host, a country singer, and two veteran TV actresses.
Not a bad way to earn a paycheck every week! But even a dream job like Dancing With the Stars has its challenges.
"I work with many different personalities, size, height and everything else," Tony told me in a recent interview. "You always have to change your teaching style. You have to find out what their strengths are, their weaknesses are, and then showcase their strengths and hopefully camouflage their weakness."
Let's take Tony's latest celebrity partner Susan Lucci as an example. Tony says the soap opera star's greatest strength also happens to be her greatest weakness.
"She's hard on herself...she pushes herself to the limit," he says. "She wants to make sure that she does everything well. But it's funny, even though that could be a strength, it can also be a weakness because sometimes she has a hard time getting out of her head and just letting [go]. But I think she's starting to approach it that way."
Now that Tony has successfully taught celebrities like Susan how to dance, the ambitious dancer wants to teach his fans as well.
"I travel around the country all the time and everybody is asking about dance lessons now," he said. "Because of the internet age, I decided to hopefully reach as many people as I can through the internet and teach them the very basics of what ballroom dancing is. So basically, I created the site ballroomdancechannel.com. It's very affordable. It's almost like the cost of a coffee at Starbucks and they can take an entire lesson."
Tony promises that dance-challenged subscribers will be able to follow his lead (no partner needed) during his online dance sessions. "I saw all of these other TV things out there and they're very hard to follow, so what I did is I discovered a way to make it easy for people to follow and learn how to dance."
With ballroom fever taking over the country, Tony is more excited than ever about the 'sport' he loves.
"Dancing With the Stars has educated America about what ballroom dancing really is," he said. "We've had people from all walks of life do Dancing with the Stars, especially the athletes who are confirming that it is a sport. It is something that is culturally very very good for us. It's probably the only sport that the man has to be a gentleman and the woman has to be a lady. It teaches people the proper etiquette. It teaches people how to be coordinated...It actually has a little bit of everything."
It's no surprise that Tony, whose wife recently gave birth to twins, hopes his children will follow in his dancing footsteps. "That's every parent's dream," he said.
Another dream for Tony? Getting paired with a certain Hollywood actress on Dancing With the Stars. When I asked him which celebrity he would love to dance with before his Dancing days are over, he answered without hesitation, "Jennifer Aniston!"