Roman Reigns (born May 25, 1985, Pensacola, Florida, U.S.) is an American professional wrestler, athlete, and actor. He is best known for holding multiple championships in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) as one of the company’s most notable stars.
Born into a renowned American Samoan wrestling family, Anoa‘i was surrounded by ring legends. His father, Sika, was one half of the Wild Samoans tag team, and he counted among his extended family a number of wrestling greats and WWE stars such as Rikishi (Solofa Fatu, Jr.), Yokozuna (Rodney Anoa‘i), and, perhaps the most famous member of the Anoa‘i dynasty, Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson.
However, despite growing up in a family of grapplers, his first athletic endeavours were in American football. After playing in high school, Anoa‘i played college football as a defensive tackle for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. He was undrafted in the 2007 NFL draft and was later signed and subsequently released by both the Minnesota Vikings and the Jacksonville Jaguars without having played in any regular season games. He eventually landed in the Canadian Football League as a member of the Edmonton Eskimos (now the Edmonton Elks) but was released by that team in 2008.
Anoa‘i started his professional wrestling career in 2010 and joined the company Florida Championship Wrestling, where he appeared under the ring name Roman Leakee. In 2012 he made his debut as Roman Reigns on WWE’s developmental TV show, NXT.
Reigns would transition to WWE’s main roster as part of a stable (small alliance) known as The Shield alongside his fellow wrestlers Dean Ambrose (Jonathan Good [who later used the ring name Jon Moxley]) and fellow WWE mainstay Seth Rollins (Colby Lopez). The trio had an impactful debut at the 2012 Payback event, where they disrupted the main story line between CM Punk (Phillip Brooks) and Ryback (Ryback Reeves) to help Punk keep the title. In their first few years in WWE, the group was featured in a number of major story lines and won tag team and midcard titles. Although all three men were each popular in their own right, Reigns was the standout of the group, earning the nickname “The Big Dog.” In 2014 he was voted superstar of the year by fans in the WWE Slammy Awards poll.
That same year The Shield broke up with a shocking story line in which Roman was betrayed by his stablemate Rollins. The resulting story line would lead Roman Reigns to becoming a main event player in WWE, a position cemented with his win in the Royal Rumble match in early 2015. Although now portrayed as a WWE hero, Reigns proved to be a polarizing figure when it came to crowd reactions. Many members of the wrestling fandom felt that his ascension had been rushed and attributed his early success to his familial connections. His appearances were met with some of the loudest reactions among the WWE roster, as dueling chants of support and derision erupted from the crowds during his matches. His rise was tempered by his failure to secure the WWE Championship in the main event match at WrestleMania 31 against former UFC star Brock Lesnar; both men lost when Reign’s rival Seth Rollins invaded the match and won instead. Despite this initial setback, later that year Reigns won the WWE Survivor Series Championship by defeating his former stablemate Dean Ambrose. He would go on to compete successfully in other WrestleMania main events, including against WWE hall of famers such as Triple H (Paul Levesque) and The Undertaker (Mark Calaway).


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