LA Knight Hated Pitched WWE Name

LA Knight has revealed how he got his WWE name.

Before signing with WWE, LA Knight went by the name Eli Drake. He used this name when he competed in TNA Wrestling. After signing with the sports entertainment juggernaut, his name changed to LA Knight. Since then, there has been no looking back for him.

LA Knight’s meteoric rise in WWE took place after he arrived on the main roster. His feud with Bray Wyatt put him on the map. At one point, he was getting crowd reactions that were on par with Roman Reigns and CM Punk. WWE even pushed him as a solid mid-card performer and had him win the United States Championship. However, he is still in pursuit of his first World Title, even though his name is on everybody’s minds.

WWE had another name planned for LA Knight

During an interview with Chris Van Vliet, LA Knight revealed that WWE originally planned to use his previous name, Eli Drake. However, Triple H decided to give him a new name suddenly, and they came up with his current name.

“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.”

He further continued to say that the Stamford-based promotion pitched for him to be LA Donovan at one point, but he didn’t like the name. Eventually, they settled on the name LA Knight, which was short enough for him to do his signature hand gesture.

“They pitched LA Donovan at one point, and I was like, ‘Blah 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. 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 [his hand gesture]…I didn’t have that 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.”

It’s a good thing that they chose his current name because it is more marketable.

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Also read: Massive LA Knight Plans Suddenly Canceled By WWE

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