Maryland’s very own LA Knight secured what many say is the biggest victory of his career, when he beat former World Champion Seth Rollins at WWE’s Saturday Night’s Main Event on July 12, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia.
Though Knight is a former United States champion, previously defeating Logan Paul for the title, this win is being looked at as the biggest victory for the 42-year-old star. During their competitive match, Rollins appeared to legitimately injure his knee after an awkward landing from a springboard moonsault. As medical personnel attended to him, Knight quickly seized the opportunity, delivering his Blunt Force Trauma (BFT) finisher to secure the pinfall.
Following the abrupt conclusion, Rollins was seen limping and being helped backstage, with reports confirming the injury was legitimate and prompted an unplanned finish to the match, raising concerns given his history of knee issues.
Before he was LA Knight, one of the hottest superstars in professional wrestling today, Shaun Ricker was a kid growing up in Hagerstown, Maryland (he even has the
key to the city
). He graduated from North Hagerstown High School, class of 2000, where he was in the band and ran track, but always dreamed of becoming a professional wrestler.
Though he appears to be outspoken now, as his LA Knight persona has been compared to a modern-day version of Stone Cold Steve Austin or The Rock, Ricker remembers how different he was when he was growing up in Hagerstown. “
I was a very shy kid, but I always wanted to be a performer. I was that kid that was so shy when I was at my grandma’s house, I would whisper in my mom or dad’s ear, ‘Could you ask her for a cookie?’ Those hand mixers, when I was a kid, I thought the metal mixer part looked like a microphone so I would take those, stand behind a door and I would sing and dance. I figured if I was behind a door, nobody would see me, nobody could hear me. It was like I was invisible.
” he said in a since-archived interview with the Ottawa Citizen.
Ricker went to wrestling school in Cincinnati after graduating from high school. He worked as a server at Ruby Tuesday while he trained and got his first “dark match” (non-televised match) with the WWE on May 5th, 2006 when he teamed with another newcomer named Jon Moxley to face The Big Show in a handicap match. Moxley went on to become WWE champion as Dean Ambrose and is currently one of the major stars of the AEW promotion.
After a few years of working on his craft in the independent circuit, Ricker found himself on a wrestling-based reality show hosted by The Rock, called
The Hero
. A strong performance on the show led to him signing to WWE’s developmental brand, NXT. He only stuck around for a year or so and found himself back on the independent circuit and with smaller promotions honing his craft. He made a name for himself at Impact Wrestling as Eli Drake, where he became a star for the promotion. In the last three years, LA Knight has become one of the most popular professional wrestlers in the world.
