The Forbidden Lore Of WWE’s LA Knight
How LA Knight made a suspicious wrestling fandom say: “Yeah-uh!”
If you were a fan of WWE’s Attitude Era growing up, you likely shared the following experience.
Steve Austin was your favourite wrestler. You spent your school days digging your friends in the stomach, praying they’d lower their heads so that you could hit them with the Stunner. The WWF was cool, and you loved almost everything about it, but Austin was the guy whose t-shirt you bought. Then, at the end of the summer of 1998, you started to fall in love with the Rock. You practised raising your eyebrow longer than you may care to admit. The Rock replaced Austin in the billing and in your heart, in 2000, and by 2001, you didn’t really want to choose. The main event of WrestleMania 17 was an impossible booking challenge.
Not for LA Knight: he chose both, and decided to splice both men together to create his “own” wrestling persona.
That was always the accusation.
Knight, given his influences, was never likely to fit in Ring of Honor and Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. He fell wildly in love with wrestling, American-style, the way you remember it, at the age of three. He instead bounced around the less glamorous indies stateside before WWE took a look at him. In an interesting trivia note, Knight went by the ring name ‘Deuce’ in the Heartland Wrestling Association. WWE would quickly use the same moniker when presenting a ‘50s greaser tag team a couple of years later. A man who was buried as a Rock and Austin wannabe actually had more in common with another Attitude Era legend: the Undertaker. For three years, under his real name Shaun Ricker, Knight was managed by William ‘Paul Bearer’ Moody in Championship Wrestling from Hollywood.
In May 2013, Knight realised his dream. He got signed to WWE. He went through the developmental name generator, which spat out the moniker ‘Slate Randall’. Early in his career, though, Knight went by the name ‘Dick Rick’. Many locker rooms who first encountered the man would deem that an apt name - by Knight’s own admission. If you have a cocky, line-stepping friend that you thought was an a**hole at first - and most do - that was Knight. Knight’s time in NXT was abrupt and barely remembered. Back in 2021, Knight ruminated on his first WWE stint in an interview with Busted Open radio. He said that he carries himself in real life the same way he does on TV: “über-confident”. Revealing that it usually “takes three months” for people to realise that he’s “actually OK”, he said he was “hated” throughout that time initially. Knight, as most wrestlers did, also ran afoul of then-trainer Bill DeMott. Knight was long gone from WWE before DeMott’s vile conduct caught up to him. When Knight was released in 2014, he was told that he was talented - but that there was a “stigma” attached to him that he needed to shake.
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