LA Knight revealed in an interview with The Daily Mail that he initially received the Max Dupri gimmick on the WWE main roster due to his age, but eventually regained his current name when Triple H took over as head of creative.
Regarding the Max Dupri gimmick, LA Knight shared,
“Oh, boy! Hahaha. I’m killing it in NXT. It’s crazy, like, just the reactions, the way I had turned from big time heel in the summertime to big time babyface by the winter. It’s not piped in and it’s not prefabbed reactions. It was organic, real stuff happening. I come up for a dark match, I get the attention of the right people; “hey, who is this guy?” but then the age thing comes up – [whispers] “oh no, he’s 40, danger’. But I’m not the average 40-year-old. I haven’t gone through the ringer. I haven’t had a bunch of surgeries or injuries, knock on that wood. I’ve lived a good, youthful life in a certain sense, and I’ve taken care of myself in a way I would say most don’t. And also, I look a certain way where obviously I’ve got somebody’s attention. But that number came up and it was like “well ok, maybe we make him a manager. So, some things happened there. It was not my cup of tea and definitely I don’t think it was for me. But somehow, there I was. Some things happened that we don’t need to go into and then eventually LA Knight was back.”
While discussing the possibility of returning to his original name, LA Knight said,
“Yeah, I was kinda’ pushing for it but didn’t know if it was really a possibility at that point because we just established this thing to this larger audience. The NXT audience is what it is, just under a million or whatever, and now you’re looking at over two million for Smackdown. So there’s a bunch of people who had never even seen LA Knight before and they’d only seen this other thing. So now, can we just change gears? So now, I think it’s a testament to his trust and a testament to my abilities to be able to turn that corner in such short order and have people not even barely remember there was another.”
Despite being booked to take frequent losses over the past few months, LA Knight’s (YEAAHH!!) popularity has steadily continued to grow since reverting to being his original self. Among the most popular superstars in wrestling, Knight is the favorite to win the Men’s Money in the Bank this year.
