Part of the deal of working for WWE is that at some point, they’re going to want to trademark your name, so they can make money off of you. It’s just how business works. In past years, a lot of independent wrestlers have hesitant to sign away the wrestling name they’ve been known by for years, which has given rise to a lot of dumb WWE wrestling names in the past decade. Since the rise of NXT, however, a lot of pre-established names have come over and held on to their most famous names. People like Austin Aries, Bobby Roode, Eric Young, Roderick Strong, and more.
But the trademark thing is very much still something WWE lives by. And sometimes, when we’re not really sure whether someone has signed to the company (something that has been happened with surprising regularity as of late), looking at those trademark filings is a damn good means of confirmation.
According to Wrestling Inc., WWE recently applied for a new crop of wrestling name trademarks. The list of wrestlers that will likely soon be under WWE copyright are:
– Bobby Roode
– Carmella
– Cedric Alexander
– Drew Gulak
– Noam Dar
– Tony Nese
– TJ Perkins
– Rich Swann
None of these names are surprising, per se. Perhaps the biggest shock is that Carmella’s name hadn’t been trademarked yet, but I guess there were other things happening when she was still up and coming in NXT. What this does tell us is that Gulak and Nese have definitely, for sure signed contracts with WWE, because you’re not going to trademark a dude’s name that’s going to go wrestle for AAW or whatever on any given weekend.
Perhaps the second-most surprising thing (but only because we didn’t think about it too much) is Bobby Roode, long synonymous with TNA, will soon be an official WWE trademark. Life comes at you very slowly, sometimes.
Once these trademarks are approved, we’ll likely be seeing Cedric Alexander and Rich Swann shirts before long. And TJ Perkins shirts, I’m sure, because it’s always important to let other people know you play video games. Radical!
