WWE.com caught up with Joey Styles to get his take on the WrestleMania announcing team from RAW and much more:

WWE.com: When WWE.com first spoke to you regarding your hiring, you said your biggest goal was to announce at WrestleMania. Now that WWE has chosen to go with Jim Ross at WrestleMania, how does that make you feel?

Joey Styles: My initial response when I was told on Monday when I arrived at the arena in Omaha was disappointment. That lasted about 30 minutes. I was told in person and I do appreciate that. Probably 30 minutes after that, my ego took over and I felt angry for about an hour. And then after real introspection, I realized Im not where they need me to be in terms of what the position is. And I think what readers of WWE.com and fans watching at home dont understand is what the position is: WWE doesnt have play-by-play men. They may call it a play-by-play man, but what that position really is, is a lead storyteller. Its a completely different animal than what I was trying to do.

The ironic part about this is that I was taught how to announce the play-by-play by Paul Heyman, who was taught by Jim Ross. And frankly, WWE has brought in Jim Ross himself, who is the best-ever at doing this, to train me so I can become as good as he is. And he told me that when he started with WWE, he had 20 years of play-by-play under his belt, and he had to be deprogrammed and start over again. He came in and called WrestleMania IX and then maybe another pay-per-view after that and then disappeared from television. He was calling, I believe, internationally syndicated TV working on not calling each and every move from a collar-and-elbow tie-up to a waist lock all the way through the end of the match and instead learning how to weave and tell the story. And Im pretty much in the same situation he was in.

What Im thankful for is that Jim has agreed to come in and in his words, pass the torch, so that I can learn to do what he does, hopefully, as well as he does, between him coaching me and me working as hard as I possibly can. I can tell you that in preparing for RAW this past Monday, I spent five hours with J.R. going over notes and how to set the premise of each match and the story of each segment and how it would lead into WrestleMania. And I learned more in five hours with Jim Ross than I have in my first five months here at WWE. And it was amazing.

And I have to say that WWE has been great with me. There have been times where I know Vince was extremely frustrated with what I was doing because he was expressing that frustration afterward. And despite what people may have read everywhere, he was never nasty with me or condescending or screaming or yelling. He was always very professional with me. But I could tell Kevin Dunn (Executive Producer) was frustrated because he couldnt really show me how to build that bridge to storytelling and I didnt know on my own how to do it. So, I dont know how often J.R. is going to be available actually at the RAW events. And again some fans  the Internet fans  a lot of them think they know what producing the announcers means; they think it means feeding us every line, and thats not the case. What a good producer does and I thought J.R. did a wonderful job last night  probably the best job Ive ever seen in someone producing me in terms of storytelling. He may have only given me five lines in a five-segment match. Thats it. But it was the right line at the right time. And its a very difficult balance to weave that story from the beginning of the segment to the end of the segment. And now with J.R., helping me, I see no reason that Im not going to get there. I mean, with the best-ever teaching me and the fact that Im going to work as tirelessly as possible to eventually be as good as he is  and I will not stop until I am, period.