Lil Yachty has become a major part of Trick Williams’ presentation over the past several months and even got physical in a short match against Baron Corbin at Sunday Night’s Main Event. None of that was where WWE originally planned to take him.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet, Yachty revealed that his involvement with Trick started with a much simpler pitch. WWE wanted him to walk Trick to the ring, similar to Offset’s previous celebrity entrance, but Yachty didn’t want to randomly appear beside someone fans had never seen him interact with.
“They were like, ‘You could walk Trick out,’ like Offset did. And I was like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t want to just pop up on wrestling, man.’”
Yachty had rediscovered his love for wrestling in 2024 and was already regularly attending WWE shows. So instead of treating the Trick appearance like another celebrity cameo, he asked WWE whether they could establish a reason for the two to be together first.
“I was like, ‘A couple SmackDowns before, could I come to a SmackDown and introduce our friendship?’”
There was one slight problem with that idea: Yachty and Trick weren’t actually friends yet. Yachty had met him a couple of times at WWE shows, but that was about it. There wasn’t some existing friendship WWE was bringing onto television.
“And it’s funny, at the time I didn’t know Trick. I had met him twice at a couple shows, but we didn’t have a relationship.”
Still, Yachty wasn’t asking WWE to suddenly make him the center of Trick’s storyline. He just wanted his eventual appearance to have some logic behind it.
“I was like, ‘Man, could I, like… is there some way that we could, like…’ I wasn’t, like, trying to insert myself in a story, but I was just like, ‘Can we make it make sense for me to walk him?’”
That question ended up changing everything. Once Trick heard about the idea, he reached out to Yachty himself. What could have been a quick conversation about an entrance turned into nearly two hours on the phone.
“Which was then… it started with me and Trick got on the phone, and we talked for, like, man, almost two hours.”
“When I guess the idea came to him, he DM’d me and we got on the phone, and we just instantly clicked.”
They weren’t spending those two hours making small talk either. Yachty said the pair immediately started tossing around ideas for what they could actually do together on WWE television. Their connection eventually started showing up through social media before Yachty began appearing alongside Trick.
“And we, like, talked of, like, a million storylines, a million ideas. And then it started with the Instagram post. He invited me. We came.”
Yachty was also putting his own money behind making it work. WWE wasn’t initially covering his travel, so he paid for his own flights and hotels for months because he wanted the company to see that this wasn’t a celebrity dropping in whenever it was convenient.
“I came and I paid for my own flights and all that stuff. My own flights, own hotel for a good minute. It was a few months before they ever started paying for the flights and stuff.”
“But I was that invested. I wanted to show them, like, ‘Hey, I really want to do this.’”
Those trips became Yachty’s audition without necessarily being called one. He felt WWE noticed pretty quickly that he could handle himself when handed a microphone.
“Did the first one, I think they was like, ‘Oh man, he can kind of talk on mic.’ Did the second one, it was like, ‘Okay, he’s kind of good at this.’ I was on time. I was there. I was diligent, had no problems.”
What started as WWE asking Yachty to walk Trick Williams to the ring ended up becoming something neither man actually had beforehand: a real relationship. Yachty wanted one celebrity appearance to make sense, and that decision ultimately turned him into a regular part of Trick’s WWE presentation.
What do you think of Lil Yachty’s involvement with Trick Williams so far? Let us know in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
