LA Knight and AJ Styles got into a brawl during their respective WrestleMania 40 media day appearances. Many believed it was a staged fight to draw interest for their match that weekend.
According to Knight, it wasn’t planned in advance, and he ultimately got a call from WWE for the incident.
Knight recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet, who was one of the many media members gathered at WrestleMania XL media day. Knight and Styles were at separate media stations giving interviews when Styles took notice and threw a chair at Knight. They ended up getting into a heated brawl, which resulted in Styles with a bloody nose.
Knight says they took things into their own hands and called a worked shoot fight on the fly. Security finally broke things up, and both were ultimately reprimanded for the brawl.
“I walked into the room and I’m shooting him looks, and he might have said some stuff. He’s doing his interview, I was talking to somebody else,” Knight explained. “So, whoever I was talking to, while I was doing that, AJ is over here behind me. I’d given looks, and he’d referenced me, and I’d looked over there, and stuff. But at some point AJ tossed a stool in my direction, and at that point all I’m thinking is again the depth of the story we had told up to now.
“I’m like, there’s no way I wouldn’t react if he throws his stool at me. What am I going to do? I’m going to fight him. So I go over and just start fighting him, and I’m thinking surely security is going to come and break this up real quick, and it just went on and on.”
LA Knight didn’t expect the fight to go as far as it did
LA Knight says he kept wondering why security hadn’t run it to stop them yet. They were both “blown up” after a few minutes of fighting, reiterating that they were working off the cuff. Knight says starting a fight in front of the media seemed like a logical next step in their feud, but he expected it to be broken up much sooner.
“Obviously, I’m sure he wasn’t intending to get to where it got to, but in my head, I’m like, I have gone to his house to fight him. He throws a stool at me from five feet away. What am I going to do? Just shrug it off? No. So I went over there, thinking security is going to take care of it.
“They didn’t. I mean they did finally, but yeah, it took a minute, and so I hit that, he slammed the s**t out of me, and he ended up with a bloody nose, so after that we both got a phone call, though, like, what are you guys doing, you can’t do that, and it was like, hey, I’m trying to keep it alive, I’m trying.”
Ultimately, the brawl worked for their story, which wasn’t one of the “marquee” feuds of the weekend. He called the fight a happy accident, noting that although they got a phone call about it, footage still made it to WWE TV.
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