In a recent interview with The Daily Mail, WWE SmackDown superstar LA Knight discussed several topics, including the WWE’s decision to re-brand him as Max Dupri initially on the main roster, revealing that the concerns regarding his age played a factor.

“I come up for a dark match, I get the attention of the right people, hey who is this guy, but then, the age thing comes up, oh no, he’s 40, danger, but I’m not the average 40-year-old, I haven’t gone through the ringer, I haven’t had a bunch of surgeries or injuries, knock on that wood, I’ve lived a good, youthful life in a certain sense, and I’ve taken care of myself in a way I would say most don’t, and also, I look a certain way where obviously, I’ve got somebody’s attention, but that number came up and it was like, well okay, maybe we make him a manager, so some things happened there, it was not my cup of tea and definitely, I don’t think it was for me, but somehow, there I was, some things happened that we don’t need to go into, and then, eventually LA Knight was back.

I was kind of pushing for it, but didn’t know if it was really a possibility at that point, because we just established this thing to this larger audience. The NXT audience is what it is, just under a million or whatever, and now, you’re looking at over two million for SmackDown, so there’s a bunch of people who had never even seen LA Knight before, and they’d only seen this other thing, so now, can we just change gears. I think it’s a testament to his (Triple H) trust and a testament to my abilities to be able to turn that corner in such short order and have people not even barely remember there was another.”

The full interview is available at this link.