HAGERSTOWN, MD — “Let me talk to ya!” WWE superstar LA Knight said when he grabbed the mic to a thunderous roar. But the popular wrestler wasn’t in a WWE ring. Nor was he making an appearance at a WWE event.
On Saturday, December 23, Shaun Ricker, the man, was honored by his hometown of Hagerstown, MD for his incredible and improbable rise to fame. Through a lot of hard work and intelligence, the self-described megastar has crafted a confident, cool, and fun throwback persona that now has “e’erybody saying L-A KNIGHT… YEAH!” worldwide.
LA Knight was presented with a Key to the City in a jam-packed University Plaza in downtown Hagerstown at noon. The 2000 graduate of North Hagerstown High School has spent the last 20 years grinding throughout independent and smaller wrestling federations before having his breakout year in 2023. The frigid temperatures did not keep the masses away.
“This is ridiculous right now. It’s like two degrees outside, y’all out here. This is wild! Thank you!” LA Knight said. “You know, it’s really funny. I’m looking out here right now and I joked a couple days ago and I said, ‘I don’t know why they’re moving us from the square to this bigger area. There’s probably going to be like 10 people that show up.'”
Instead, there were hundreds of rabid fans and locals who came to show their appreciation, holding posters, wearing his shirts, and screaming his catch phrases.
The event came about in a matter of days as Hagerstown Mayor Tekesha Martinez learned about a connection to the wrestler during a recent council meeting.
“In my closing comments, I said, ‘Do you guys know LA Knight’s from Hagerstown?'” Mayor Martinez said. “Well, Councilmember (Matthew) Schindler said, ‘Well yeah, I went to school with him.’
“I said, ‘Reach out. See if you can get a message to him. Use your relationship and see if you can honor him whenever he’s home on his own convenience,’” she continued. “And so I wanted to tell you this literally started Monday, maybe? I think he maybe texted me on Monday saying ‘Hey, he’ll be home for the holidays’ and it was like, ‘Okay, how about Saturday? ‘Okay, how about this?’ And it turned into this (event).”
The City of Hagerstown Facebook page, which has 19k followers, posted an open invite to LA Knight supporters a mere three days before the ceremony. Speaking to LA Knight’s star power, the press release quickly went viral, garnering over 1.2k likes and 1.4k shares.
“I just want to tell you guys, dreams absolutely come true,” Mayor Martinez said. “One of the things that I have kept seeing and hearing as people see me in the city, ‘LA Knight, this is his dream. That was his dream since middle school, high school.’ So when you come back home with your dream completed and in your dream, living your dream, thank you. That’s why you’re getting the Key to the City today. Consistency, commitment, hard work. We thank you for what you represent to us. We thank you for coming home and not forgetting about home.”
During the presentation, not only did LA Knight receive the symbolic key, but he also received a special recognition.
The certificate read:
Hagerstown Mayor and City Council recognize Shaun Ricker, AKA WWE superstar LA Knight, in appreciation and in recognition of the North Hagerstown High School graduate. We would like to present to you the Key to the City. This key is not a key to any lock, but is the true key to the hearts of the citizens of Hagerstown, Maryland.
He was also presented a “WHY NOT BELIEVE IN YOURSELF” trucker hat, which he held up proudly to the crowd.
Trained by Cody Hawk and Les Thatcher, LA Knight first began his wrestling career in 2002. Since then, he’s made notable stops in NWA, TNA, and Impact Wrestling. He’s had seven different ring names that he eventually shed including Deuce, Dick Rick, Dick Rick Leykis, El Hijo de Trump, Eli Drake, Slate Randall, and Max Dupri. His insane run over the past year is actually the second different time he’s been signed with WWE. Ten years prior, he was signed by the company and was primarily used as an enhancement talent and extra before being released on August 1, 2014.
During that span, LA Knight tried his hand in Hollywood, but did not completely catch on there either. He appeared on the TNT reality television show The Hero that was hosted by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
LA Knight is America's hero pic.twitter.com/EPaGAelsLh
— Wrestling News (@WrestlingNewsCo) July 13, 2023
He was also cast in an Aldi grocery store commercial spot.
And in 2015, perhaps his biggest highlight, LA Knight was cast as a male bodybuilder named Mario in an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Season 2. Episode 17). It was a non-speaking role.
“Look, I have such pride from coming from here,” LA Knight said. “I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio with a crazy dream to do this wrestling thing. I struggled, was broke, I starved. I moved to California. Man, I got my butt whooped out there and I had to go back to Ohio with my tail tucked between my legs. Went back to LA, down to Florida, went to WWE, and in it all – I always find myself right back here.
“And the craziest thing for me right now is the fact that again, I started this by saying, ‘I expected 10 people to show up,’ and all of you, Hagerstown, you showed up and you showed out,” he said. “I come back to this town every single year, whether it’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, just summer to see family, whatever. This is my home. This has always been my home. It will always be my home.”
After a promising run as LA Knight in WWE’s developmental territory, NXT, from 2021 to 2022, the wrestler was brought up to WWE’s main roster where he was re-cast as Max Dupri, a manager in charge of comedy act, the Maximum Male Models.
The stable of jobbers included wrestlers ma.çé and mån.sôör and Max Dupri’s storyline sister Maxxine. The group quickly flopped. Under Triple H’s creative leadership, Max Durpri “re-found” himself as LA Knight, which was seemingly his first and final opportunity to make it in WWE as the character he had developed over the previous two decades. The Hagerstown native hit a home run in the pressure packed moment.
Incredible on the stick, LA Knight, a heel, was chosen to be Bray Wyatt’s foil in a feud. Not only did he showcase the returning and legendary superstar, but the character showcased a fearless and sometimes unfounded bravado that fans connected with and appreciated.
Since then, LA Knight has been on a meteoric rise, sharing the ring with legends like John Cena and Randy Orton. His biggest match came in November when he (barely) lost to Universal Champion Roman Reigns at Crown Jewel, the main event of a premium live event.
According to LA Knight, rubbing elbows and power-slamming such huge stars, was still surreal to him, especially when he was never handed a road map to the top.
“I started right up the road going to school at Fountaindale Elementary School. I had a year at Salem Avenue. I went to Northern Middle. I went to North Hagerstown,” LA Knight said. “I didn’t come from – I didn’t have a lot of people around me who did the things that I’m doing now. I came from a pretty humble beginning, I’d say kind of a blue-collar beginning. This town has a blue-collar kind of strength to it. My dad loaded trucks for a living. My mom worked as a branch manager at the Hagerstown Trust, God rest its soul.
“When you think about doing something like I’m doing now, it’s not real,” he continued. “It’s not attainable. It’s not a real goal, real job that you can go do. At least in your mind, you’ve got to get past that. I always had. For me, Hagerstown’s a place that has like that small town kind of blue-collar feel, but with a big city kind of dream. As you can see, everything around here is building up. There’s new developments, all that kind of stuff. You have to think about where you want to be, what you want to do, and find a way to get there any way you can.”
LA Knight even suggested that he ended up at the event due to the kindness Councilmember Matthew Schindler showed him through condiments many, many years ago.
“Does everyone know the Taco Bell there on Morgans Avenue?” LA Knight asked the crowd. “All right, look, my friends and I, we like to have fun. We were going through the drive thru one night and we had our order, and we got up to the window, and I see this bright, shining face standing at the window. He said, ‘Would you guys like any sauce?’ And earmuffs, kids, we said, ‘Can you give us an ass-load of fire sauce?’ He did not disappoint. He came back with a full to-go bag of fire sauce, and for that, I thank you. YEAH!”
At age 41, LA Knight may be a late bloomer, but that has made him appreciate his path to the top even more. If the support from the hometown crowd is any indication — he signed autographs and took photos for nearly half an hour as two police officers tried to help him make his way to his car — he has many more big moments to author in the future.
“If you’ve got dreams, follow them,” LA Knight said. “But at the same time, it’s not just following those dreams. You know how many times I should have quit? You know how many times I shouldn’t have made it? In a weird way, I shouldn’t be here right now. There’s a 100 times where I should have said, ‘this is enough.’ People around me said, ‘Hey, man, it’s time to get a real job. It’s time to do this, it’s time to do that. It’s time to forget about this and do something else.’ And I said, ‘Nah, nah.’
“Maybe there’s a mental deficiency somehow,” he joked. “I don’t know how to quit. I can’t quit. So whether it’s a relationship, whether it’s a dream, whether it’s anything you want, don’t give up.
“…YEAH!”
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Photos
All photos taken by Ian Oland/RMNB.
