Mark Shapiro gives his thoughts on Nick Khan as an executive.
Endeavor recently agreed to purchase a majority stake in WWE to merge the UFC and WWE under one corporate umbrella. As part of this new corporate structure, WWE CEO Nick Khan will continue as the president of WWE and report to Endeavor president Mark Shapiro, who will also be the president and COO of the new company.
In a recent interview with Richard Deitsch of The Sports Media Podcast, Shapiro on working with Khan from back when Nick used to work with ESPN.
"I don’t work with Nick day in and day out with the WWE, so I’m not best to talk about his full range of attributes. I can just speak to my personal experience. I worked with Nick back when I was at ESPN. Nick is a relationship guy. He spends a lot of time, honest time, dedicated time, real authentic time building relationships, maintaining relationships, sustaining relationships, and back and forth relationships," said Shapiro. "He’s a what you see, what you get guy. He wears his emotions on his sleeves, he’s very direct, you know where you stand. I enjoyed all my negotiations with him over the years at ESPN and was a fan of his at CAA as he was building out that sports broadcast business, from scratch. They’ve got some terrific guys over there (Matt) Kramar and (David) Koonin, disciples of Nick, but when he was there, he had an incredible roster of talent. I would tell you that, if he goes about his business in WWE in the same fashion and manner of which he went about his business at CAA, then the sky is the limit."
It was recently announced that the new company's name will be TKO Group. Learn more here.
Mark Shapiro also stated in the recent past that Endeavor plans on running the "UFC playbook" when it comes to WWE. Learn more here.
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