LA Knight Reveals WWE Made Him A Manager Due To Concerns About His Age

LA Knight is one of the most popular talents on WWE TV, regularly receiving big reactions on Friday Night SmackDown, and the former IMPACT World Champion is one of the favourites to win the men's Money in the Bank Ladder Match on July 1 in London, England. 

LA Knight almost didn't make his way to the main roster, though, as after a run in NXT, Knight was repackaged on SmackDown as Max Dupri, the manager of Ma.çé and Mån.sôör as part of Maximum Male models in May 2022. After months as a manager and one regime change within WWE that saw Triple H become Chief Content Officer, Dupri ditched the character and returned as LA Knight. 

Speaking to the Daily Mail about his run as Max Dupri, Knight revealed that WWE turned him into a manager over concerns about his age. Knight was 39 years old at the time. 

"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," Knight stated.

"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."

Knight then revealed that he was pushing to scrap the Max Dupri character and he paid tribute to Triple H for doing so. 

"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," Knight added.