When Vince McMahon was ousted from WWE last summer amid a series of sexual misconduct allegations, it took no time at all for Triple H to step in and head up Creative.
The quality of storytelling (and matches) on RAW, SmackDown, and NXT was immediately noticeable, and The Game moved quickly to undo much of the damage done by the WWE Chairman. That included giving Maximum Male Models' leader, Max Dupri, his name back: LA Knight.
Since then, his popularity has only increased, making him a favourite to win this Saturday's Money in the Bank Ladder match.
However, it was prior to Vince's departure we first heard about Knight having backstage heat; it's thought he refused to continue being Max Dupri, prompting Vince to pull the plug on any sort of "push" he'd get as that lame duck character. Now, he's addressed his near-firing.
"Let me just go ahead and say this: I'm pretty sure I was fired, and it just hadn't officially happened yet," Knight recalled in an interview with Chris Van Vliet. "Without getting into too many details, some things happened. I don't remember what it was, but some things happened."
"And then I had gotten a FaceTime. 'Hey, you know, we want to keep you around. We want to do this, this, that whatever.' Okay, cool. Good. 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," he concluded. "And so eventually, just things kind of worked out."
With Vince once again getting hands-on with WWE Creative since returning to facilitate the company's sale, there are some concerns about Knight's future. However, not even the 77-year-old can ignore his popularity and we have seen him booked relatively well in recent months.
You can check out the full interview below.