In an interview with The Daily Mail, LA Knight revealed that he was given the Max Dupri gimmick on the WWE main roster due to his age. Knight would eventually get his current name back after Triple H took over as head of creative. Here are highlights:

On getting the Max Dupri gimmick: “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.”

On pushing for his old name: “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.”


https://411mania.com/wrestling/la-kn...dupri-gimmick/

He's almost 41 and facially he looks older, he looks like mid 2000s marty janetty in the face Ded fkn srs no lie.

His gimmick should work with that imo, him dressing as a guy in his 20s is just stupid, he should be wearing a suit, it makes more sense.

I'm dorry my Knight but you are an old cel

Hurr, his age! He's 40, too old, hurr durr!!

Everyone in a mens title picture is between 35 and 45. Get the fuk outta here with that chit.

He's over as fuk - pausing at the end of the promo and offering nothing but three finger points and having the whole arena yell "L A KNIGHT" should tell the higher ups this kunt needs to be pushed to the moon FFS

And he's got over based on his promos, his in ring performances and despite the fact he's been working chitty mid card matches with a dodgy win rate. He planted that Boog kunt head first into the mat after they lost a tag match and he was cheered for it. Boog was over too.

Would rather listen to his weekly 5 minutes than listen to that Uso who tries to sound black

This