The Miami Herald has an interview up with WWE’s Joey Styles. Here are some highlights from the interview.
If he misses announcing:
“Not one bit. I called matches for 10 years, and I feel like I’m contributing to the company more now. I don’t want to give away too much, but I think you’ve seen changes in WWE.com over the past year, and mostly in terms of video and television programming that can be distributed on the web.
On changes to WWE.com in the last two years:
“The next two years are going to be mind blowing and revolutionary the same way pay-per-view itself was revolutionary to television. What’s going to happen between the relationship television content and the Internet — IPTV as its called — is going to be revolutionary once again, and I’m so happy WWE.com is trying to stay in front of it.”
If there is any comparison to announcers and WWE.com staff:
“Not even close. As an announcer, I could fly in Saturday morning, attend the Hall of Fame, wake-up Sunday, work out, look at the two or three matches I was calling. I pretty much knew the storylines very well from calling the weekly show. Managing the WWE.com staff on the road is just non-stop. There is always something because everything changes. With an event this big, let’s get one of our three video crews. Besides all the television crews WWE has here, WWE.com has three video crews here as well as writers and all the still photographers. We’ve all been criss-crossing. It’s much, much more exciting and much more fulfilling to be working for WWE.com than it ever was working as a broadcaster.”
On the “April Fools” joke on WWE.com involving Vickie Guerrero:
“The April Fool’s joke that we went with was not my idea. I got over-ruled. I wanted to go with a different one. We had three options. They all got approved by management. I wanted to go with an interview with Khali who speaks perfect English — like with Matt Striker, five-syllable words, but they went with Vickie pregnant instead. I don’t know if we fooled anybody, but it was fun.”
On Matt Striker getting a role as an announcer on ECW:
“Matt Striker. He’s a friend of mine. He knew at his size (5-10, 224) he wasn’t going to be a main eventer. He got to wrestle at WrestleMania 23 in Detroit in front of 80,000 people, and they were using him as a manager which we really don’t do here much. I knew he wanted to try out as an announcer. I said, `I really can’t help you with that. I can throw your name out there.’ What happened was when Mick Foley departed, Taz moved up to SmackDown, and there was an opening in [WWE’s] ECW. It was that day that they were looking for somebody, and it was known Matt wanted an audition. He went out there and ran with the ball. I love Matt’s color commentary because it’s insightful. It’s humorous. Some of the jokes a lot of people don’t get. He’s learned to be PG. One of the funniest things he did was making a joke, saying, `Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, like Guns N’ Roses new album Chinese Democracy, uuhhk,’ and then they wound up being a theme song for us two months later. So Matt cracks me up, and he loves being an announcer. He’s probably enjoying this more than wrestling. He’s just a lot of fun, and he’s exactly like he is on TV. He’s a know-it-all, quick witted. He’s my kind of guy.”
To check out the full interview, click here.