Joey Styles, formerly of ECW fame, posted the following at 1wrestling.com in answer to why he does not work for WWE.
Every week, I begin my Premium Audio Hotline by answering any questions that you fans e-mail to me. I realize that only a small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of people that visit 1wrestling.com hear my weekly hotline so I am going to answer the one question that I get asked every single week here in public and I hope it gets picked up by every other pro wrestling news website so we can finally move past this issue.
Question: Joey, why aren’t you working for WWE? Will you at least appear on the WWE/ECW pay-per-view?
Answer: After ECW and WCW ceased operations in early 2001, I was interviewed by and received a full time employment offer from WWE Executive Producer, Kevin Dunn. After making it very clear to me that my ECW experience did not matter to him or WWE because WWE was the “major league” and I would still be a “WWE rookie”, I was offered less than half of what I earned as the announcer for “minor league” ECW and less than half of what WCW announcers had been earning as well. I was even told that the fact that WWE no longer had any competition was one of the reasons for the offer.
I politely and professionally made it clear that I did believe my experience with ECW was indeed valuable to WWE and that I was willing to make 20% less than I made with ECW with the hopes that I would prove my worth to WWE and make more after my one year contract expired.
I was told that WWE simply would not pay any announcer the amount I was asking for.
Because I lived five minutes from the WWE TV studio, I offered to keep my full time corporate career and work part time for WWE, hosting their syndicated and international taped TV shows.
I was then told by Kevin Dunn that part time employment with WWE was not an option because “WWE likes to own their talents”.
I told Kevin I was sorry we could not come to terms, thanked him for having me in, and even apologized if I had wasted his time which I thought was very humble and polite on my part.
It then came back to me from other WWE employees that Kevin Dunn thought I had a bad attitude and was hard to deal with which made me very angry because I felt that I had been very polite while WWE had been condescending and somewhat heavy handed in dismissing my ECW experience and calling me a rookie.
That is why I do not work for WWE.
Not to read too much into it, but it’s probably unlikely that he will be doing anything with the proposed “One Night Only” ECW PPV in June.
Credit- Joey Styles & 1wrestling.com
