Subscribe
Follow Us
In 24 hours, LA Knight‘s WWE career will either reach an incredible height the likes of which basically no one has achieved this decade or will join a list of roughly 20 WWE Superstars, many of whom are current or future Hall of Famers, who just couldn't get past the biggest bad WWE has seen in years, Roman Reigns.
And yet, when you consider the path the “Megastar” took to reach his current status within the WWE Universe, just landing a main event match at Crown Jewel against the “Tribal Chief” is a pretty incredible accomplishment, as he didn't even sign with NXT, at least ahead of this current run, until 2021, when he was easily a decade older than the vast majority of the performers he was interfacing with.
Still, Knight rose above the rest based on sheer charisma and willpower, and in the end, he's checked off boxes he didn't even know were on his wishlist, as he explained to Cameron Hawkins of The Ringer.
“I had all these different goals and things in mind when I first signed back in 2021 to NXT, and I wrote a bunch of them down: year one, year two, year three, year four,” LA Knight told The Ringer. “And there's just some of these things that I didn't even know were potential possible goals, such as winning the Million Dollar Championship. I didn't know that was a possibility. Being in a Slim Jim commercial, I didn't know that was a possibility. So we're kind of checking off boxes that I didn't even know were there to begin with.”
Asked about this near-20-year journey to WWE, Knight noted that though he never had a hookup to help him along the path, in the end, his sheer tenacity drove him along the way and will ultimately land him in Saudi Arabia this weekend.
“Nobody ever wanted to give me a shot,” LA Knight noted. “I didn't have the hookups. I didn't have somebody in my family who was in the business. I didn't have anybody who really had that kind of a hookup. Anytime that I kind of started to get my foot in the door a little bit, people get a certain perception or thought about me one way or another with me barely saying two words to them. So it always made it kind of tough for me to get going anywhere. Some of that, I'm sure, sits on my lap. I hold some of the fault in that, I'm sure. But at the same time, once I got that opportunity, I knew I was going to run like h*ll with it, and that's what I've done.”
Is this the weekend everything changes for LA Knight? Will he become the new top star in the WWE Universe, or will he fall short and have to rebound like oh so many other performers before? Regardless of the outcome, just making it to the venue is a major victory.
No, LA Knight is not a tribute act to anyone.
Elsewhere in his conversation with The Ringer, LA Knight was asked about the routine acquisitions sent his way from around the professional wrestling world that he's a ripoff of the “Attitude Era.”
Though LA Knight isn't running away from the question, as at this point, it would be foolish to; he asserts to fans that he is no “tribute act,” just a student of the game.
“I'm not trying to be a tribute act to anybody. Do I draw from some of that? Sure I do. Did Flair draw from Nature Boy Buddy Rogers? Sure, he did. Did Hogan draw from Dusty Rhodes? Did he draw from Superstar Billy Graham? Of course, he did. One of the greatest things that I kind of get from time to time is getting older guys, especially, who just go, ‘Man, I haven't watched in years, but you've gotten me back into it,'” Knight explains. ‘You give me that feeling that I used to get from it,' and I go, ‘OK, good. Then I'm doing my d*mn job.'”
Will LA Knight ever get over the comparisons he's drawn from all over the WWE Universe? Will fans accept that, despite having a few specific references he likes to call back to, it's not different than luchadors doing a little shimmy in tribute to Eddie Guerrero before hitting a Frog Splash? Or will haters continue to hate like Garyson Waller's least favorite person, Taylor Swift, sings to her audience of “Swamp Donkies” – his words, not mine? Securing a massive win at Crown Jewel could help to define that decision one way or another.
