-- In a recent interview with The Daily Mail, WWE superstar LA Knight spoke of his his run as Max Dupri - the manager of the Maximum Male Models, revealing that he was repackaged into that character largely due to concerns Vince McMahon had with his age. Once Triple H regained power as the lead of talent/creative, Knight says he was able to work to revert back to his current persona.
"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."
-- Going into more detail about switching back to LA Knight:
"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."
