LA Knight recalls the concerns shared by WWE officials amidst his transition to the main roster.
Upon his ascent to WWE’s main roster, many fans believed LA Knight would continue with the same gimmick and name. Instead, he was repackaged into Max Dupri, the talent agent for the Maximum Male Models. With this new role, Knight’s in-ring performances were limited, as he had officially transitioned into a manager position.
Speaking with Alex McCarthy for Daily Mail, LA Knight revealed that internal concerns over his age prompted WWE to re-brand him as a manager. At the time of Knight’s SmackDown debut last year, he was 39 years old.
“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.”
On July 22, Max’s “sister” Maxxine Dupri made her main roster debut. There, she announced herself as the new Director of Talent at Maximum Male Models. Max Dupri was subsequently written out of the storyline a couple of months later, shoving his clients, ma.cé and mån.sôör to the ground. The next week, Max Dupri was back in his original form as LA Knight.
Dupri’s gradual transition back to LA Knight began around the same time WWE CEO Vince McMahon announced his retirement. On the heels of McMahon’s resignation, Paul “Triple H” Levesque stepped up to take control of WWE’s creative department. Amidst Levesque’s promotion, LA Knight began lobbying for the revival of the previous character he played in “NXT.”
“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,” Knight said. “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. 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.”
Since reverting back to LA Knight, the 40-year-old has become a growing hit with the main roster audience.
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