Trick Williams is having the kind of year where the wins keep piling up in more than one arena. Two days after locking himself inside a steel cage to keep his United States Championship, he’s on the cover of SLAM Magazine standing next to an NBA All-Star.
Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers shares the SLAM Issue 264 cover with Williams under the headline “Showstoppers: Built for the Spotlight,” a feature by Kazeem Famuyide that treats the pairing less like a novelty photo op and more like two guys who genuinely run in the same circles.
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How a Torn Achilles Turned Into a Wrestling Friendship
Haliburton has been out since tearing his Achilles in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, a brutal way to end a run where he averaged 17.3 points, 8.6 assists and 5.3 rebounds a game and hit some of the biggest shots of the playoffs. According to the SLAM piece, wrestling became part of how he got through the rehab, and that fandom is what led him to Williams in the first place.
“You can tell I’m a wrestling fan by the way I talk sh*t,” Haliburton says in the story. “That makes it fun for me.”
It’s not just talk. Haliburton showed up to WWE‘s Saturday Night’s Main Event at Madison Square Garden in July and leaned all the way into being a heel, trying to interrupt a Roman Reigns segment in the building where he’s already Public Enemy No. 1 for eliminating the Knicks in back-to-back postseasons. The story also touches on Triple H offering him support during the injury, which apparently helped seal the bond.
Williams’ Side of the Story
Williams, a former South Carolina football player who went through an NFL rookie minicamp with the Eagles before pivoting to wrestling, is in the middle of his second reign as United States Champion and drawing the kind of “next big thing” comparisons to The Rock that don’t get thrown around lightly. He backed it up two days before this cover dropped, surviving a steel cage against Baron Corbin on the September 25 SmackDown to retain the title.
Both guys are also coming off a summer that changed their personal lives as much as their professional ones. Per the SLAM feature, Williams and Haliburton both got married this year, which the story leans on as part of the “built for the spotlight” framing, two guys hitting career-defining moments and life milestones at the same time.
Why It Works
Crossover magazine covers usually happen because a publicist made a call. This one reads different. Haliburton isn’t a celebrity dabbling in wrestling for a photo, he’s a guy who leaned on it during the hardest stretch of his career and then went and heckled Roman Reigns in enemy territory for fun. Pair that with Williams mid-championship-reign and fresh off a cage match, and SLAM ends up with a cover that doubles as a preview of two comeback stories at once, one aiming for the NBA Finals again, the other aiming for a world title.
