After WWE’s Roman Reigns revealed his years-long battle with cancer, we’re looking at this story he told on Talk Is Jericho in a new light.
No one who tuned in to WWE ‘s Monday Night Raw on October 22 could have expected what opened the show. Roman Reigns, in street clothes, entered the ring and announced that he had been battling leukemia for the past eleven years after being diagnosed at the age of 22. He said his cancer was back, so he was vacating the Universal Championship and leaving pro wrestling in order to fight it, but promised he would be back “very, very soon.”
During his announcement, Reigns briefly described the period of his life surrounding his cancer diagnosis. He said,
This was the first most people who know of Roman Reigns had heard about his struggle with cancer. Obviously, we, wrestling fans who don’t know Joe Anoa’i personally, don’t need to know anything about him besides what he chooses to share, but this sheds some new light on what we already knew.
The basic, public story of Anoa’i’s life goes like this: born into wrestling royalty, son of Sika Anoa’i of the Wild Samoans tag team, brother of Rosey. Star high school football player. Star George Tech football player and team captain in his senior year. Signed by the Minnesota Vikings in 2007, then the Jacksonville Jaguars, but released by both teams before the start of the 2007 NFL season. We now know this would have been around the time he was diagnosed with leukemia.
The rest of his professional football career consisted of five games for the Edmonton Eskimos in the CFL in 2008. He was released by that team in November of that year and retired from football. WWE’s press release about Reigns’ announcement stated that his cancer “had been in remission since late 2008.” Reigns was signed to WWE’s developmental territory, in its last days of being called Florida Championship Wrestling, in 2010.
In light of his announcement, I wanted to share this transcription of a story Reigns told on Chris Jericho’s podcast, Talk Is Jericho, in 2017, about the period of his life between the end of his football career and when he started working for WWE. This part of that podcast stuck in my mind as an inspiring story of a person getting his life back together. Despite not sharing any of Reigns’ more unique experiences and circumstances, I related to it a lot where I was in my life at the time, and it reminded me of a lot of people I knew.
