Good evening everyone. I'm David Bohagen, the CEO of Meridian, and I'm thrilled to see the energy in the room tonight. I really want to start by thanking our guests here tonight, including our partners at TKO Group and in particular Dean Garfield who helped get things kicked off here tonight. So, thank you, Dean. And there are so many leaders from business, government, and the theory at Meridian is you're all diplomats and we are thrilled that you're all here. I want to thank our actually Senate confirmed and other State Department diplomats as well. Sarah Rogers, Under Secretary, is she here yet? Not here yet. But we'll look forward to seeing her and she gave tremendous remarks today. Ambassador Monica Crowley, Assistant Secretary Kate Dylan's here with us tonight, Darren Bey at the US Institute of Peace, Rob Play, and the rest of the sports diplomacy team at the State Department. Thank you all for being here and thanks for supporting the important work at Meridian around the world. I also want to thank our presenting sponsor, that's American Global Strategies, and particularly my friend David Malipass, who's tall, but I don't see him in the room. Yeah, I saw him and his lovely wife Adele earlier. Tonight's conversation comes at a critical moment. We are in the middle of one of the most consequential decades in sports and history and so much of that is running through America. It's kicking off obviously with the World Cup across the entire continent. But what we're seeing with the UFC this weekend is unprecedented and really shines light on the cultural values of America around the world. So many fighters and so many golfers come from different countries around the world and that's the way that people experience their countries and how they experience America. And so again, everyone's a diplomat and in our 250th year hopeful can continue to build on the values that sports teaches whether it's resilience or whether it's making sure there's sportsmanship or courtesy. All those come together in what we're talking about tonight in diplomacy. It's more than competition. It's also connection. There's nothing that pulls people together like sports. You can be sitting next to the people that you're rooting for with your country in a way that you wouldn't get together in other formats. And it really helps diplomacy work, right? There are times in the world where countries aren't talking, but athletes and sports and cultural figures are. And it's part of what we call here open diplomacy. So that's why we're especially pleased to convene tonight's program tonight. There are so many people who are shaping the future of sports which is shaping the future of the world and truly building a more peaceful and prosperous world. And I want to thank you all for being here. So I get to welcome to the stage three panelists tonight. John Iran, the sports correspondent at Puck, Brown Rolap, the CEO of the PGA Tour, and Mark Shapiro, the president and chief executive operating officer of TKO. So let's give them a round of applause.
Well, this is a real treat having these two on stage here. But Mark, I want to start with you because Kirk Herbstreit is a famous college football announcer, pro football announcer, and he had a post on social media at the end of the Knicks game last night where you were jumping around like a little kid. And as we're getting ready to talk today about the power of sports and what sports can do to bring communities together, describe what that was like.
Yeah, I think you got to break it up into two parts. John's also obviously referring to the NBA Finals game last night at Madison Square Garden where the San Antonio Spurs were up by 29 points over the New York Knicks and the Knicks somehow found a way to come back and literally win it in the final seconds and the garden just erupted. But it's interesting and David said it about sports unifying us. I mean that is the common shared language of sports, right? And you can never determine the outcome. It's a different outcome every time. And the crowd of course thinks they have a hand or a say in the outcome. I mean that's the greatness of sports. There's the certainty of the event but the uncertainty of the outcome. And I would just tell you last night you had a first half where the entire arena was unified, completely unified in their distrust and deceit for the referees. So they were unified. You saw them together as one. It was a very hostile environment. And then at the end, and I'm not even a day-to-day New York Knicks fan. I'm from Chicago. I will just tell you that that happens. And that's just one of those glorious moments and you're looking around and phones are up in the air and everyone's hugging each other, right? There's no hate, there's no dislike, there's no friction, there's sadness on the Spurs side, but it's in New York, so the majority of fans are New Yorkers and Knicks fans. And there's just love. And I would tell you, at a time like this, sports and entertainment have never been more important, right? What do we have? We have political division, right? We have constant stress. We have information overload. And sports and entertainment provide a shared cultural language, a language which allows us to get away, to connect with people, and to sustain emotional well-being. And it's really a unicorn. And last night, mine was just a genuine reaction. I'm just shocked.
And I can't emphasize this enough. I've covered you for 25 years. You've been in the business for a long time. You were last year Puck said that you were the executive of the year for sports. You've seen it all and still something happened with a team that you don't even particularly like that much and you're jumping around.
Exactly. I just didn't expect it. Right. It just they surely can't come back from 29 points. And I'm sitting with Larry David and John McEnroe and they're longtime Knicks fans and the whole game they're mad and they're not talking to anyone. They're not getting out of their seat, crossing their legs, these menacing faces and then all of a sudden they're jumping on top of each other and it's just one of those moments. The ball goes up and you know it hits the rim and you're oh they came so close and then somebody flies out of the sky and puts it back in and the whole place just blows up. I mean it really only sports can do that. Only sports can do that.
When was the last time you jumped around at a golf tournament or NFL game?
Last time I jumped around it was when Mark asked me to do this panel with him. That's probably the last time.
So the idea of this panel is really to talk about the globalization of sports and sports as a unifier. As you look at international markets and as you look internationally, what are the types of things that you're looking for with the PGA Tour?
Well, I think anyone in the sports business looks for exactly what Mark is talking about. I can't think of any other thing other than sports that is a universal language. You don't have to speak a language. You understand human competition. All the things that Mark talked about. I also think what sports has and golf has is there's a meritocracy to it. And I think golf is one of those sports where it's like you eat what you kill. It's one stroke over four days. And sports is one of the places on this earth where people can look at it and the best actually come to the top. And that's a universal human interest and emotion and that's where the stories come from, right? The stories come from the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. And so that's why sports in general is just international and universal which you can't find anywhere. So there are lots of things that we look at when we look at tournaments internationally. We have a great partnership with European tour. It is an international sport. People play all over the world. But I think what translates even if you don't play the sport is the things that we're talking about here. I was at the NFL for 23 years and we played football games in London and all these other places. There's not many football fans in London, but they understand human competition and that's extremely interesting, especially in this tech heavy AI world where what's real, what's not. I'll tell you what's real. What's going on on the field or on the course with human competition that's just increasingly genuine for people.
UFC, WWE, they've gone international completely, right? What are the things that you're looking at market to market to make you say that that's the market that we want to go to?
Look, I think both are unique and original and individual in the sense that they recognized a long time ago that there's a larger world out there beyond just the United States. And whether that's the expansion of Asia or Europe and the way they have really gravitated and embraced sports to islands and territories all over the world, there's followings, there's interests, there's rooting, there's storylines, there's hero, there's villain, there's elation, there's sadness, all these attributes and all these emotions that run through are all consistent across all sports all over the world. Of course, it might be cricket in India where it's more football for us and in Europe it might be a different kind of football but that's what it is and everybody connects to that. So when we look at our sports, we'll use AI, we'll use social chatter, right? We'll use writers that we have on the ground. Where are we popping? Where are we seeing interest? Where are we seeing followings? Especially sports is very provincial. So where you have local storylines or local heroes, we'll tap into that and as that following starts to get a critical mass, bang, we'll bring an event to that city and we will capitalize on the crowds, on the chatter, on all the earned media, on the advertising we get, and of course on the local sponsorship opportunities to use our marks and use our athletes to really ultimately grow our brand. And UFC is pretty well spread around the world. We're having enormous success in Europe, enormous success in Asia, enormous success in Australia. We're monster audience in Canada. And now WWE is seeing that same path. They're already ginormous in the United States, but really starting to click in Europe, really starting to click in Australia, already big in Canada, and in India they already have a strong foothold as well. So it's really capitalizing and then figuring out how often you need to come back to really keep priming the pump. And if you can get yourself a global audience that sticks where your messages and your events resonate, well then you've got a pretty good business on your hands. And for the countries that we deal with, and I know there's a lot of ambassadors and some of our partners here in the audience, it's about bringing you events and matchups that will drive economic impact and we do that in spades whether it's hotels or fans coming out to the arenas or your restaurants being full. That's really the name of the game and then at the end of the day everybody wins.
So it sounds to me one of the words that I've heard here today several times is sports diplomacy. It sounds to me like you see an opportunity, a good business opportunity, you take advantage of the business opportunity and the diplomacy comes after that. Brian, when you think of sports diplomacy, what do you think of? What does that mean?
