LA Knight almost walked into WWE with a very different name, and he’s making it clear he was never going to be happy with it.
While speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Knight revealed that WWE originally planned to bring him into NXT in 2021 as Eli Drake, the name he had already used before signing. That plan changed just days before his debut when Triple H wanted him to start fresh with a new identity.
“When I first signed NXT in 2021, they were like, ‘We want to bring you in as Eli Drake.’ I’m like, ‘Great, perfect.’ And then like three days before, they’re like, ‘Never mind. Hunter wants to change it. He wants to start completely fresh and new.’ And then that’s when, between all of us, we came up with it. LA was from me, Knight was from them. And there we had LA Knight.”
Knight said WWE also had a completely different name in mind at one point that had nothing to do with his old name: LA Donovan. He hated it immediately, saying it would have boxed him into the wrong kind of character and made him sound like someone he did not want to portray.
“They planned LA Donovan at one point, and I was like, ‘That’s awful. No, that’s so awful and terrible.’ I feel like it pigeonholes me, and it’s sh**. I’m forever a douche. I can’t do that.”
For Knight, the key was landing on something short and easy to remember. Once LA Knight was picked, he didn’t feel the need to overhaul the character because the same attitude had already worked for him in TNA and NWA before WWE.
“But you want a simple name. What do you do with LA Donovan? So finally we settled on LA Knight. Even if it didn’t work out like that, I didn’t have this five years ago, so it didn’t matter. I could have done anything. But here’s something I had already been doing that was already working. It was working in TNA. It was working in NWA. What are the chances this is going to work here? I guess it’s going to. And it did.”
Knight then made it clear that the LA Knight persona was never some completely new WWE creation. It was the same personality he had been using for years, just turned all the way up: “So at that point, it was like, ‘OK, let’s run with this.’ The character is exactly the same. It’s the exact same sh** because it’s really just me amped up.”
LA Donovan clearly never stood a chance once Knight heard it, and WWE landing on LA Knight ended up being the right call. The name became a major part of his presentation, and Knight’s own explanation shows he knew exactly what kind of identity would fit him best.
Do you think LA Knight was the right name, or could LA Donovan have worked? Let us know your thoughts and feedback in the comments below.
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