LA Knight Believes He Was Almost Fired From WWE In 2022

LA Knight is one of the fastest-rising stars in WWE's men's division. After spending years on the independent scene under the name Eli Drake, Knight was signed to WWE in 2021. He worked in NXT for the first year of his WWE career before making his main roster debut in 2022 with a new gimmick: Max Dupri, manager of the Maximum Male Models.

RELATED: Randy Orton's Return to WWE Programming Nearing, Says Kurt AngleMax Dupri didn't last very long. The character was never quite able to get off the ground, leading WWE to revert him back to LA Knight. Since then, his popularity has skyrocketed. Even as a heel, LA Knight is able to get the crowd on his side through his sheer charisma.

Was LA Knight On The WWE Chopping Block?

During an interview with Chris Van Vliet, LA Knight revealed that he's "pretty sure" he was fired before WWE assigned him the Max Dupri gimmick. The following transcription has been provided by Fightful:

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. Maybe I’m incorrect, I don’t know. Eventually, things just kind of worked out and I think maybe again, maybe some of the testament of why things are working the way they are and why people are reacting the way are is because one of these [characters] is not me and I didn’t know who it was and one of these was very much me and I didn’t have to think about LA Knight.

This weekend, LA Knight will be competing in WWE's annual Money in the Bank ladder match. He is a favorite to win among fans, but you'll have to tune in and see if Knight is indeed able to capture the MITB briefcase.