Roman Reigns Reveals How He Got His Ring Name

Roman Reigns is one of the biggest stars in WWE–though some may argue that’s merely a product of the full force of Vince McMahon’s marketing machine.

Still, Reigns is a household name for fans–even if that moniker bears no resemblance to his real name of Leati Joseph Anoa’i. So how did Roman settle on his ring name?

On a recent episode of Talk Is Jericho (transcript via WrestlingInc), Reigns revealed exactly that.

“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!”

So that’s the story. Thank goodness, since it led to us getting this utterly stupid song.