AEW Vice President Explains Why He Quit WWE
A former WWE executive has explained why he left the company as he embarks on a new vice president role with Tony Khan’s AEW.
Mike Mansury spent eleven years with WWE, climbing through the ranks of the company and achieving the role of Vice President of Global Television Production before he left of his own accord in 2020.
Mansury spent time working as an executive for Pat McAfee and ONE Fighting Championship in Singapore but now he is back in the wrestling business, signing on with AEW as the company’s new Senior Vice President & Co-Executive Producer beginning on the 14th of December Winter Is Coming edition of Dynamite.
Speaking on The Sessions with Renée Paquette, Mansury explained that despite his crazy WWE schedule, it was the halt to his professional development in the company that caused him to walk away as he’d be told time and again they didn’t know what else to do with him until they knew what long-time Executive Vice President of Global Television Production Kevin Dunn was going to do next:
“I had gotten to a certain point in my career where I wasn’t really being developed any further. My schedule was pretty wild at the time. Those last six months before I left WWE, I mean, I would do Raw on Mondays. Tuesday, I would fly from wherever we were in the world to LA to go do Backstage. Take a red eye from LA on Tuesday nights to Orlando, sleep on the plane, go do NXT, which at that point had gone live on USA, work office hours on Thursday, like I would fly back to New York with Triple H on Wednesday night, get home at about two or 2:30.”
“Thursday I was doing office hours and kind of prepping for everything to come after. Friday, we would do Smackdown. Saturday, maybe a down day, and then Sunday, it seemed like at that point in life, we had a pay-per-view, like every other week. It was a lot, but I didn’t mind it.”
“So in terms of my professional development, you know, it was always inferred, and I think at some point, maybe even formalized that should anything have happened or if he decided to retire, that I was going to be the successor to Kevin Dunn on the TV side. But I, at that point, was self-aware enough to know that I couldn’t do it, and not in the sense that I couldn’t do the shows.”
“I can do Raw and SmackDown in my sleep. Pay-per-views, no problem, all that sh*t. I’d shown them I can do it. But it’s more so the business end of it and the non-TV side of what that role is because there’s more to what Kevin does than just sitting in a truck and line producing Raw, Smackdown, you know, whatever show it is.”
“I’d 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, but we don’t really know what to do until we get an understanding of what Kevin’s future is.’”
According to WWE Hall of Famer Ric Flair, AEW has got themselves a good man in Mansury and he thinks it’s for the best he moved on as he doesn’t think Kevin Dunn is going to step out of the hot seat any time soon.