It’s hard to imagine now, given the passionate crowd response LA Knight receives every time he’s on WWE TV, but there was a time not that long ago when he was floundering. So much so, in fact, that WWE had him play another character: Max Dupri, the founder of Maximum Male Models.
Though Knight put his heart into the role, it always seemed a strange fit for his talents. But as he told Chris Van Vliet in a recent interview (h/t Fightful), that’s because he felt it was a choice between becoming Dupri and looking for work elsewhere.
Well let me just go ahead and say this, I’m pretty sure I was fired and it just hadn’t officially happened yet. But without getting into too many details, some things happened, I don’t remember what it was, but some things happened and I had gotten a FaceTime, ‘Hey, we wanna keep you around, we wanna do this, that, whatever’, somehow I had been saved from being thrown off the cliff, at least this is my interpretation of it.
Knight first appeared as Dupri in the spring of 2022, teasing Adam Pearce that he was scouting for models and would unleash them on the world when he felt he was being given the proper fanfare. That finally happened on the May 20 episode of SmackDown, when the WWE Universe met the Maximum Male Models.
Happily, someone in WWE realized at some point they were better off with Knight as himself. He split from the group on the Sept. 30 SmackDown and fought his former charges the next week under the ring name he’d used during his time in NXT.
The rest, as they say, is history. Knight continues to rise in popularity on the main roster, and is one of the favorites to win the Men’s Money in the Bank Ladder match this weekend in London. If it took a quick detour as Dupri to get to this point, we imagine he’d give a trademark “Yeah!” to any question about whether it was worth it.