Roman Reigns (the guy with a lot of class) is a lot of things to a lot of people. He’s a WWE main eventer, a possible new breed of bad guy, a movie bootlegger, and a dirty Undertaker-retirer. He’s also a beautiful man with a very cool name, even if it’s not his real name. (Shhhh, don’t tell anyone.)
How did he get that name, you ask? Well, he finally spilled the beans on that little nugget of info, and thankfully, it’s a far more entertaining story than the standard FCW/NXT story of “they asked me to come up with 25 first names and 25 last names, and we went from there.” It involves — as most good stories do — a released wrestler, an attempt at a one-word name, and Corey Graves.
Reigns revealed the whole tale to Chris Jericho on a recent episode of Talk is Jericho. (Transcript via Wrestling Inc.)
“I knew I wanted Roman. I liked Roman. I wanted Roman only and they were like, ‘no, you need a last name’. And there’s actually another guy in FCW by the name of Calvin Raines. He spelled it like ‘rain’, like a ‘raindrop’. And they, I believe, released him and sorry, brother. He’s a good man, a real nice brother. Sorry. Roman Raines sounded good to me, so they were like, ‘alright, give me four or five different names’ and they were like, ‘okay, we’ll go with like’ … I was going through it and Corey Graves, he was down in FCW, still working at that time, he’s actually one of my good buddies and our families are like really good friends. He told me, he was like, ‘hey, I heard you saying ‘Roman Raines’. What if you spelled it like, ‘reigns’, like a king reigns.’ And I was like, ‘whoa, I like that.’ And there you go. And total heel name too!”
He just wanted to be Roman! ROMAN, the wrestler. I love that, but I love it even more if he wanted it to be pronounced “ROW-MAN.” THE MAN WHO ROWS. Man, Roman Reigns is the best. That’s pretty indisputable at this point. Surely no one on the internet will disagree with that take!
