Add as a preferred source on Google LA Knight has opened up again about one of the strangest periods of his WWE career, when he left NXT and was introduced to the Friday Night SmackDown audience as Max Dupri.
Speaking in a recent interview with Chris Van Vliet on Insight, the former United States Champion revealed that Vince McMahon did not want him using virtually anything from the LA Knight character on the main roster.
“So the bill of goods that was sold to me there was that I was going to be kind of a Roddy Piper in the sense of when Roddy first came in, he was like a manager, a mouthpiece that then sometimes wrestled and then eventually just became full-time wrestling.”
“There were some other details in there that made me think like, okay, this could be okay. And then it started going in directions where I was like, this is going to be awful. This is going to be pigeonholed. We’re stuck. We’re never going to get above a certain trajectory.”
“This was Vince’s baby. He was so big on this Maximum Male Models thing. Vince told me before, ‘You got to talk soft. I don’t want you to say or do any of the things that you used to do.’”
“Vince said that he didn’t feel like you were listening last week and he needs you to be softer. And he said if you can’t be softer and if you’re not going to listen, he’s going to find another Max Dupri.”
The character, however, never clicked. After McMahon stepped away from creative, Knight was gradually repositioned back as LA Knight.