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Evolve Fires Former WWE Announcer Joey Styles Following Donald Trump Joke

By Shawn Lealos
Published on: 14:45 PST, Nov 12, 2016

Evolve Wrestling held their Evolve 72 pay-per-view last night and former ECW and WWE announcer Joey Styles was there doing commentary. According to Cageside Seats, Evolve promoter Gabe Sapolsky forbid Joey Styles from making any political jokes, smart considering Styles is a hardcore Republican and the country is torn in half after the recent presidential election.

Styles ignored the demand. He was in the ring with Stokely Hathaway, the manager for Evolve Champion Timothy Thatcher. Styles cut into Hathaway for his former wrestlers leaving him for the WWE after making it big. However, Styles also made a joke about having a live mic and told ring announcer Joanna Rose that she looked so good that the president-elect “might grab her by the –” and then cut himself off.

This was a joke based on the Donald Trump comment made in a video years back that surfaced during the presidential election. While Joey Styles didn’t say the word, the fact that he made the joke about President-elect Donald Trump set off Gabe Sapolsky. After talking about how furious he was, Sapolsky then announced that Evolve had fired Joey Styles for the jokes.

This wasn’t the first time that Joey Styles was fired for making off-color comments. Joey Styles ran the WWE website until the company fired him this year. According to PWMania, Joey Styles did an interview and talked about the WWE pushing Roman Reigns too hard because kids and their moms liked him and he didn’t like the idea of the Universal Championship.

The word is that the WWE fired him because he said too many things that were considered “insider” information for the WWE. It was similar to an angle from a few years back where Joey Styles cut a work-shoot promo on Monday Night Raw against the WWE.

Joey Styles, unlike others who the WWE fired, really doesn’t need to work for the company. He made a lot of money outside of professional wrestling and did it for the love of the industry. Recently, Joey Styles said he wanted to be the “Voice of the Indies” and got jobs with Evolve and Chikara.

However, as always, Joey Styles says what he wants, when he wants, and doesn’t seem to care what anyone else thinks. Once again, that has cost him a job in wrestling.

Joey Styles got his start in wrestling back in 1992 with North American Wrestling Alliance, but really broke out when Paul Heyman hired him to be the announcer for ECW. Unlike WCW and the WWE, Joey Styles did commentary for ECW by himself with no color commentator. His squeals of glee and excitement were as much a part of ECW as the action itself.

Joey Styles did a little work in wrestling after ECW shut down, but after he impressed the WWE with his work on the ECW One Night Stand pay-per-view in 2005, the company hired him to work on Monday Night Raw and WWE ECW. In a shoot promo in 2006, Joey Styles quit and moved behind the scenes.

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Joey Styles did a lot of work to build up the WWE Digital Media Content division. He worked hard on the WWE website and also created digital content for the YouTube channel and more. He continued with that work until the WWE fired him in 2016.

Now, after just starting on his job as the “Voice of the Indies,” Evolve Wrestling has also fired Joey Styles. He still has his Chikara gig and will likely find work in other indie promotions, but a high profile termination like this will probably hurt his chances for employment in the bigger indie promotions.

[Featured Image via WWE]

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