Trick Williams left WrestleMania 42 as a clear staple of the WWE’s future.
Just months after making his debut on WWE’s main roster, Williams—whose real name is Matrick Belton—won the United States championship over Sami Zayn. It was a signal that the WWE believes Belton, 31, is next in line to be one of its biggest stars.
It’s a pedestal Belton had always dreamed of: He always wanted to be one of the best. He just didn’t think it would be as a pro wrestler. Just years earlier, the former South Carolina wideout saw his football dreams come to an abrupt end when he was cut by the Eagles.
“I believed I was going to play at the Super Bowl and perform at halftime,” Williams told Front Office Sports ahead of WrestleMania 42 in Las Vegas. “I didn’t know what that meant but I believed that.”
Belton was a star wide receiver for Hampton University from 2013–14. In an attempt to forge a path to the NFL, he transferred from the FCS to the SEC, playing the final two seasons of his college career for the Gamecocks.
Despite the move, an NFL career remained unlikely. In two years at South Carolina, he played 21 games with just five starts. His career stats with the Gamecocks: 11 catches, 121 yards, and zero touchdowns.
He went undrafted in 2017 and the Eagles tryout a year later was the closest he got to the NFL. “Football wasn’t showing me love the way I thought it was,” Belton said.
A last-ditch attempt at a professional football career led to a fortuitous opportunity in wrestling.
After Belton was cut by the Eagles, he asked his agent to send his information to the XFL, a spring football league originally founded by Vince McMahon. He was called back for a tryout, not from the XFL, but from another one of McMahon’s companies: WWE.
“Maybe I got mixed up in the system,” Belton said. “Up to that point, I had never thought about being a WWE superstar.”
In recent years, WWE has put an emphasis on finding talent with cross-sport capabilities. Jessica “Tiffany Stratton” Woynilko was a U.S. national team gymnast; Isaac “Oba Femi” Odugbesan was a shotputter for the University of Alabama; Anriel “Lash Legend” Howard, Belton’s fiancé, had a brief stint in the WNBA.
But football is historically where the pro wrestling giant has found the most success.
WWE legends Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson and Bill Goldberg both played professional football, while Joseph “Roman Reigns” Anoaʻi, currently one of WWE’s top stars, played college football at Georgia Tech.
The physicality of football makes it easier for athletes to transition to the bumps in wrestling. But the shift is far from simple, which is why WWE initially rejected Belton.
“There has to be a certain amount of smoothness and grace to [wrestling],” WWE Hall of Famer and head of talent development Shawn Michaels told FOS. “I think that’s what challenged him most.”
But the tryout was enough for Belton to recalibrate his future. Football was out of the picture, and he now wanted to be a professional wrestler.
Belton started training with former WWE wrestlers Drew Gulak and Joe Gacy in Philadelphia while working as a fitness trainer in his day job. After more than a year of 16-hour workdays, he finally got another WWE tryout in March 2020.
“COVID breaks out,” Belton said. “They send us back home.”
Belton refused to return to Philadelphia because he didn’t want to put his family at risk during the pandemic, so he moved to Los Angeles and trained at KnokX Pro with wrestling legend Rikishi. He lost his job as a fitness trainer due to the pandemic, so he paid the bills by working as a food delivery driver, online teacher, and extra for music videos as he waited for another shot at the WWE.
“Through the hardships, knowing I had to work and DoorDash through L.A., I still genuinely enjoyed my life,” Belton said.
The call he had been waiting for came in December 2020. Belton flew to Orlando and signed with the WWE two months later.
He quickly found his footing in the WWE. He turned into one of the faces of NXT, WWE’s developmental promotion, becoming a two-time NXT champion.
“We knew he was going to be special early on, it was just a matter of allowing him to find his footing in the ring,” Michaels said. “His charisma jumps off the page. That was obviously the first thing. … But Trick is a hard worker. There is no lack of hard work in that young man.”
After spending more than four years as one of the faces of NXT, he made his official WWE main roster debut on the Jan. 2 episode of SmackDown. Many NXT call-ups take a while to gain the favor of the broader WWE audience, but there were no growing pains for Belton. Despite initially being positioned as a heel, the crowd positively responded to the charisma and flashy aesthetic of Belton’s character (all-white fur coat and white, heeled boots that he calls the “lemon peppers steppers”) by showering him with a chorus of “Whoop That Trick” chants during his entrances.
Three months later, the WWE rewarded Belton with a WrestleMania moment. Trick Williams walked out at Allegiant Stadium with a 75-yard fur coat alongside rapper Lil Yachty. Then, he defeated Zayn to win his first main roster championship.
Eight years after Belton’s football dreams shattered, after he realized he would never figure out what his childhood dream of playing and performing at the Super Bowl really meant, it all clicked: He had just performed in front of 50,000 people at the site of Super Bowl LVIII. This is what he had dreamed of all along.
“Here today, I stand before you: That’s exactly what I do now,” Belton said. “I’m a performer. I am an athlete. I do it all together.”
