Roman Reigns, the wrestler who became a star once WWE let him be booed

Roman Reigns

Photo: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 25, 1985 Pensacola
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	WWE Championship · WWE Universal Championship · World Heavyweight Championship 2026 · WWE Tag Team Championship 2013 · Royal Rumble ×2 · WWE World Heavyweight Championship · Universal Championship ×2
Individual awards	Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame · Men's Royal Rumble winner · Pro Wrestling Illustrated PWI 500 No. 1 · Sports Illustrated Wrestler of the Year · ESPY Award, Best WWE Moment

For years, Roman Reigns stood in WWE rings as the hero the company had chosen and the crowd had not. Arenas booed him on nights he was scripted to triumph, louder the harder the company insisted. What rescued him looked at first like a surrender: WWE stopped asking anyone to cheer and let him play the smug, calculating head of a wrestling dynasty. That villain became the most bankable act of his generation. Now he is champion again, and he has taken the same cold stare into cinemas as Akuma, the demon-eyed brawler of Street Fighter.

The man behind the ring name is Leati Joseph Anoaʻi, and the business was in the house before he could walk. His father, Sika Anoaʻi, and his brother Rosey both wrestled for a living, and the extended Anoaʻi family has supplied WWE with Yokozuna, Rikishi, Umaga, The Usos and Solo Sikoa. He grew up in Pensacola, Florida, the son of a Samoan-descended father and a mother of Sicilian Italian ancestry.

Football was the first plan, and it carried him from Pensacola, where he was born on May 25, 1985, to Georgia Tech. There he started on the defensive line for three seasons, captained the team as a senior, earned first-team All-Atlantic Coast Conference honors in 2006 and finished a degree in management. Undrafted in 2007, he signed with the Minnesota Vikings, and the team physical returned a diagnosis of leukemia. The Vikings released him within weeks; the Jacksonville Jaguars kept him for less than a week. He played five games for the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League in 2008, was cut that November and walked away from the sport.

WWE signed him in 2010 and sent him to its Florida developmental system, where he wrestled as Roman Leakee. The main roster met him in November 2012 at Survivor Series, as one third of The Shield alongside Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins: three men in tactical black who came through the crowd rather than down the entrance ramp. With Rollins he won the WWE Tag Team Championship in 2013. When the trio split in 2014, the company chose Reigns as its next leading man.

The audience did not agree. He won the 2015 Royal Rumble and was jeered while standing in the ring as its winner. WWE kept pressing: his first WWE World Heavyweight Championship came that November, he beat Triple H in the main event of WrestleMania 32, and he defeated The Undertaker at WrestleMania 33, only to face several minutes of booing on Raw the next night before saying “This is my yard now” and leaving the ring. In June 2016, two days after losing the title, he was handed a 30-day suspension for violating the company’s Wellness Policy. That same year Pro Wrestling Illustrated named him its Most Hated Wrestler and ranked him No. 1 in its PWI 500, a contradiction that sums up the period. The fair reading, with hindsight, is that crowds were rejecting a role built for him, a reluctant underdog, which never suited a 6-foot-3 heavyweight from wrestling royalty.

The illness he had kept private interrupted all of it. In August 2018 he finally won the Universal Championship from Brock Lesnar at SummerSlam. On October 22, he opened Raw by relinquishing the title and telling the audience that the chronic myeloid leukemia first found in 2007 had returned. He came back on February 25, 2019, to announce it was in remission, and he continues to manage the disease with lifelong oral chemotherapy. In March 2020, immunocompromised and with five children at home, he withdrew from WrestleMania 36 as the pandemic spread.

He returned at SummerSlam that August with Paul Heyman at his side and a new character. Within a week he was Universal Champion again, now as the “Tribal Chief,” a man who demanded that his own cousins acknowledge him. The Bloodline storyline, built around The Usos, Solo Sikoa and Sami Zayn, ran like serialized family drama for nearly four years. His Universal Championship reign lasted 1,316 days, the longest in the title’s history and the longest WWE championship reign recognized by the company since 1988; for 735 of those days he also held the WWE Championship. It ended at WrestleMania XL in April 2024, when Cody Rhodes pinned him the night after Reigns had teamed with The Rock. WWE retired the Universal title with Reigns as its final champion.

The character has kept shifting since. Rebranded as “the OTC,” he reclaimed the Bloodline’s ceremonial Ula Fala from Solo Sikoa on Raw’s Netflix debut in January 2025, then lost the WrestleMania 41 main event after Heyman betrayed him. He won the Royal Rumble again on January 31, 2026, and on April 19 beat CM Punk in the main event of WrestleMania 42 in Las Vegas to win the World Heavyweight Championship. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer rated the match five stars, the first such rating of Reigns’s career. He has since defended the title against his cousin Jacob Fatu, against Seth Rollins at SummerSlam, where the two closed their twelve-year rivalry with The Shield’s fist bump, against Penta in Mexico City and against LA Knight at Money in the Bank in New Orleans on October 10. No wrestler has headlined WrestleMania more often than his eleven times.

Hollywood has been a slower build. He played Mateo, brother to Dwayne Johnson‘s Luke Hobbs, in Hobbs & Shaw in 2019, took a small part in the Netflix comedy The Wrong Missy and voiced characters in the animated Rumble and, opposite CM Punk, Zootopia 2. In August 2025 WWE wrote him off television with a staged beating at Clash in Paris so he could shoot Street Fighter, Kitao Sakurai’s adaptation of the Capcom games, in which he plays Akuma alongside Cody Rhodes as Guile and Jason Momoa as Blanka. The film opened on October 16 to largely unfavorable reviews, yet weekend estimates put it at the top of the North American box office.

Away from the ring he has been married since 2014 to Galina Becker, a former Georgia Tech track athlete he met in college. They have five children and live in Tampa.

His next fight is already on the calendar. On November 7, at Crown Jewel in Riyadh, he meets Undisputed WWE Champion Sami Zayn, the friend who once broke The Bloodline open with a chair, in a champion-versus-champion match. Twelve years after crowds refused him as a hero, the question around Reigns has changed: how long one performer can stay at the center of a company that once could not sell him.

Tags: sports, athletes, Street Fighter, WWE, Cody Rhodes, professional wrestling, Roman Reigns, CM Punk