Despite finding great success in NXT as LA Knight, it was Vince McMahon who decided to bring him to SmackDown as Max Dupri, the "brother" of Maxxine Dupri and manager for the doomed Maximum Male Models.
It was a horrendous gimmick to be saddled with, but one Knight was able to rid himself of within a few weeks of Triple H taking charge of WWE Creative.
Talking to Daily Mail, Knight looked back at the transition and revealed why exactly he went from being an active wrestler to a manager.
"'Oh, boy! [Laughs]. 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," he recalls. "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 wringer. 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."
"I look a certain way where obviously I’ve got somebody’s attention," Knight continues. "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."
It's obvious that he wasn't happy with Vince's plans for him on the main roster, but after proving himself in that feud with Bray Wyatt, Knight appears to have WWE's full support. He's since become one of SmackDown's most popular Superstars and fans are behind him in a big way heading into Money in the Bank.
As for how he was able to return to being LA Knight, he added: "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."
"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."
Will you be cheering him on in the men's Money in the Bank ladder match next month?