Lil Yachty says he turned down the chance to simply appear at WrestleMania because he knew exactly how wrestling fans treat a celebrity who shows up for one night. Yachty walked Trick Williams to the ring at WrestleMania 42 in April and has been a fixture on WWE television since. On Insight with Chris Van Vliet, he explained that the offer started smaller, and that he asked for more work rather than less.
It began with him making himself available to Neil Lawi, who runs WWE’s music operation.
“I don’t know if I asked him if there was ever an opportunity somehow for me to do something, anything. Y’all need the floor scrubbing? Anything, I’d love to do it,” Yachty said. “He’s like, I’ll let you know. That went on for a long time, and then WrestleMania was coming around. He was like, how would you like to walk out Trick for the entrance? I was like, f*** yeah.”
Then he thought about it.
“I was like, I’m so invested. I know what it’s like when a celebrity walks out or does something randomly with WWE. The IWC does not f*** with it,” he said, using the shorthand for the internet wrestling community.
So he went back to them with a counter-proposal.
“I said to them, hey man, this opportunity is amazing. I would love to do it, but is there any way, I’m down to cover all my cost, whatever, if I could somehow make it make sense that I’m walking him out?” Yachty said. “I didn’t want to just pop up on WrestleMania. I was like, a couple of SmackDowns before, could I come to a SmackDown and introduce our friendship?”
He was careful about how he framed the ask.
“At the time, I didn’t know Trick. I had met him twice at a couple of shows, but we didn’t have a relationship,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to insert myself in the story, but I was just like, can we make it make sense for me to walk him?”
What followed was a phone call that ran nearly two hours.
“I guess the idea came to him, he DM’d me and we got on the phone and we just instantly clicked. We talked up a million storylines, a million ideas, and then it started with the Instagram post,” Yachty said.
He also paid his own way into it.
“He invited me. I came, and I paid for my own flights on all that stuff. It was a few months before they ever started paying for the flights,” he said. “But I was investing. I wanted to show them, hey, I really want to do this.”
Williams has told the same story from his side. Speaking to Sneaker Reporter earlier this year, he said WWE approached both of them about Yachty walking him out before WrestleMania, and that Yachty’s response was that if they were going to do it, he did not want it to be a one-week thing. He has also said Yachty is not there to be a part-timer and wants to work the smaller markets as well as the big ones.
The on-screen introduction happened on the April 3 SmackDown at the Enterprise Center in St. Louis. Zayn retained the United States Championship against Carmelo Hayes in the main event, Yachty came through the ropes afterwards and taunted him as a gingerbread man, and Williams hit the Trick Shot. Sixteen days later at Allegiant Stadium, Williams beat Zayn for the title on night two of WrestleMania, with Yachty involved in the finish after Zayn had thrown him into the barricade.
The reaction he predicted arrived within a day. Yachty answered it publicly on X, saying he understood people were upset but asking them not to step on his moment, that he watches every Monday and Friday, that he has been to more premium live events than most and probably knows more history than most, and asking who was to say he did not deserve to be part of something he loves.
Yachty has trained at the Performance Center with Norman Smiley, with WWE posting a video of it in May that opened with him in a helmet complaining about how sore he was on day two. He gave Williams the idea to put white fur on the United States Championship, and wrestled Baron Corbin in a five-minute challenge at Sunday Night’s Main Event on September 6, which he survived. Williams took the title back from Corbin later the same night.
Yachty said in the same interview that he suspects the match was Triple H wanting to see him take a beating, and that he still does not entirely know how he ended up in the ring.
