LA Knight signed with WWE in February 2021 after spending years in IMPACT and NWA as Eli Drake. Knight joined NXT upon debuting and starting to gain traction with the NXT audience thanks to his feud with Cameron Grimes, which also featured Ted DiBiase and the Million Dollar Championship.
Knight was called up to the main roster in 2022, but repackaged as a manager named Max Dupri, the top representative for a modeling agency.
Speaking to Alex McCarthy of Daily Mail, Knight explained why he became Dupri.
"Oh, boy! Hahaha," He said when asked what his reaction was when he learned he would be Max Dupri. "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."
He continued, "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."
When Vince McMahon retired as CEO of WWE in July 2022, Triple H took over as the Chief Content Officer. Triple H implemented many changes to the roster, which included having Knight drop the Dupri gimmick.
"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," he said.
Knight is currently set to compete in the men's Money in the Bank ladder match at WWE Money in the Bank.
Fans can check out the current lineup for WWE Money in the Bank by clicking here.
