Former WWE star Bobby Steveson (Damon Kemp) spoke with Fightful on a number of topics, including how he wanted to use his real name in NXT.
Steveson said, “I wanted to keep it. I want to keep it because I felt like I already made a good name for myself before I got here. So I was like, why switch it? It was kind of like a restart. So how they go about names are, you get closer to TV and they wanna do something with you. They’ll give you options for a name. So like, what I did was you send them a bunch of options and if they like it, they don’t, they just keep going and eventually, or they’ll pick something for you. So what I did was I would write down, I Googled, I typed in ‘cool names for guys, first names,’ and they all popped up. So then I wrote them all down and then I typed in ‘cool last names for guys,’ and they all popped up. So I like wrote first and last names right here and then I kind of just like drew a line here, drew a line there, there, there, there, there, then I submitted them. Then it’s funny because my other option for my first name was Diego. They were like, ‘Oh, you want to do Diego or Damon?’ and I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t look like a Diego. I’ll just do Damon.’ So I went with Damon and then it was funny because literally as my name, like I did a 205 live with Andre Chase and then I looked at like Twitter on like that Friday night and I seen that there was a guy that murdered people in like Daytona. His name was Damon Kemp also.”
On there being a killer named Damon Kemp:
“Yeah. He was literally all over the news and then I told I told one of the guys I was like, ‘Hey, you know, there’s a serial killer out there from Daytona named Damon Kemp, right? Like, should we change it? This is a bad thing.’ Then, ‘Oh, no, no, just leave it. It wasn’t that big of a deal. Like, it didn’t make that much news.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, look at NBC. It’s on of the news.’ Yeah, and I was like, ‘The first thing they’re gonna see until I actually make a name for myself is a guy’s mug shot with the same name as me.’ So then I kept the name, so I was like, ‘Alright, cool.’ But yeah, that’s not that you’re the names. You just pick a bunch of random names and hopefully, whatever you throw at the wall sticks, that’s how it went.”
You can check out Steveson’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
