Michael Mansury joined the WWE in 2009 and served in the company as the Vice President of Global Television Production. He proved to be an asset to the executive team, however, he decided to leave the company in March 2020, right before the onset of the Covid pandemic that shut down things.
Michael Mansury worked with Pat McAfee and other promotions after that, before signing with AEW in December 2022 as Senior Vice President & Co-Executive Producer. He recently detailed his WWE exit during an interview with Renee Paquette on The Sessions.
“I got to a certain point in my career there where I wasn’t really being developed any further. My schedule was pretty wild, those last six months before I left. Do Raw on Mondays, Tuesday I would fly from anywhere to LA to do Backstage, take a red eye to Orlando on Tuesday nights, sleep on the plane, go do NXT, which at that point had gone live on USA, work office hours on Thursday, fly back to New York with Triple H on Wednesday night, Thursday is office hours and prepping for everything on Friday with SmackDown, Saturday maybe a down day, and Sunday it seemed like we had a pay-per-view every week.
It was a lot. I didn’t mind it, but I mean more so in terms of my professional development. It was always inferred, and maybe at some point maybe even formalized that should anything happen if he decided to retire, I was going to be the successor to Kevin Dunn on the TV side. I, at that point, was self-aware enough to know that I couldn’t do it. Not in the sense that I couldn’t do the shows, I could do Raw and SmackDown in my sleep, pay-per-views, no problem. I could do it, but more so the business end, the non-TV side of what that role is.
There is more to what Kevin does than just sit in a truck and line produce Raw, SmackDown, whatever it is. I had grown tired of hearing, ‘We can’t figure out what to do with you until we know what Kevin’s future is.’ My review was always, ‘You’re doing a great job, you’re killing it, we don’t really know what to do until we get an understanding of what Kevin’s future is.”
“I knew there was more I was capable of, but I had already excelled in everything they had allowed me to do. I was looking for that new challenge, even if it was something outside of the scope of what people would define as my potential, it would have been nice to be able to spread my wings a little and take on a new challenge. Once I realized I was in the lane that I was in and the path to the destination wasn’t going to change, or even progress that much, I knew it was time to make a change.”
Michael Mansury to The Sessions
Michael Mansury is now with AEW. Tony Khan has already made it very clear that Dynamite and Rampage are set for a change in January when Mansury starts. We will have to wait and see how Mansury does in All Elite Wrestling.
H/T to Ringside News
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