Michael Mansury was once the Vice President of Global Television Production for WWE and was viewed as the successor to Executive Producer Kevin Dunn. However, he left WWE in 2020 and was recently hired by AEW to be its Senior Vice President and Co-Executive Producer alongside Tony Khan. Mansury appeared on The Session this week and explained to Renee Paquette why he departed from WWE, citing its intense schedule and being effectively stuck in the same position until Dunn eventually steps down (even after Vince McMahon’s departure from the company, Dunn is still with the promotion in the same role).
“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,” Mansury explained. “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.”
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Mansury opted to leave just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. While he initially negotiated with AEW, he eventually landed with the ONE Championship MMA promotion. He moved back to the United States earlier this year and resumed talks with the young wrestling promotion.
“There was definitely unfinished business in a, I don’t know that I left wrestling feeling fulfilled. I think when I left WWE, I was burnt out and frustrated,” Mansury said. “Even after I left WWE, I left and jumped right into Pat’s show, but we were also in the middle of a global pandemic, and you didn’t really have time to process that I just left a place that I had spent a third of life working in, where I grew up as a man. I hadn’t had time to process that. Nor were the situations going on in life in a place for me to process that. It started to dawn on me that there was still a lot more that I’ve yet to accomplish. Around the summer, I started talks again with AEW. A few folks had reached out, shoutout to [AEW Chief Legal officer] Megha (Parekh). Megha and Tony (Khan) were pretty inviting right from jump street. ‘We have an opportunity here, we feel the company is at the threshold of that next level and next iteration of what AEW is in establishing our identity and everything else in between.’ They wanted to gauge my interest and see if I would be interested in coming along for the ride. It was a pretty long process, and at that point, I said I was interested for sure, but we were getting ready to launch ONE on Prime Video and I wanted to give that the focus it deserved. It occupied a lot of my thoughts. We got to the point, ultimately, as conversations progressed, we were literally packing up our bags to head to the US and going back and forth as to what this role would be, what I would do. We came to an accord and here I am.”
