Roman Reigns was a guest on ESPN First Take earlier today, and spoke about his battle with leukemia and what he’s learned from it. Reigns said he’s learned that it’s OK to let people help you, and once he figured out whether he wanted to keep things private or connect with others to help them, he saw that he wasn’t alone:
“It’s OK to lean on people, it’s OK to accept that support. For the longest time, I felt like I was on an island. I felt very insecure and I didn’t know how everyone would react. Especially being a public figure, a performer, I never wanted anyone to think that I was trying to make this benefit my performance or my career. I just felt—I wanted people to respect me for the work that I put in and the performer that I am. Sometimes life throws a wrench at you and it’s not exactly how you planned, and it put me at a crossroads where I had to figure out if I wanted to continue to keep this secret of mine or if I was able to tell my story and be able to connect with those who might be able to lean on it and use it as an inspiration.”
How was he able to put a brave face in public and deal with this privately?
“It’s just something that, I guess as a young man, I just learned how to compartmentalize stuff and different emotions. I just always prided myself on still being able to live my life, and I thought that was the route I wanted to go down. Still to this day, I wanted people to respect the work and the time that I put into my craft, and the way I educated myself towards my trade by putting everything into sports entertainment and how to lead this life. As I’ve said before, sometimes things just happen unexpectedly and not the way you planned, and you just have to adjust and feel it on the fly. It was one of the better things I’ve ever done with my life and I think it’s given me new purpose. I’m still able to do all of the things that I love and compete, create—I have a deep passion for storytelling—it has also given me a different purpose as far as the people I connect with, the outreach that we have, the platform and the awareness. If my story can help one person, then I think it was worth sharing.”
How the world of sports and his history helped him embrace his battle with cancer?
“I think the disciplines that I have learned through athletics and sports and competition have helped me. Obviously it’s helped me a great way as far as staying in shape and maintaining a certain degree of health from a physical standpoint. For me to continue to do that, I think even with the adversity that hit me, I think it’s cool for people to see that even though you get knocked down, people still do pick themselves back up and dust themselves off. By no means are these situations to be prepared for, but being within the fraternity of athletics, it helped me to have opportunities and the amenities of physicals, doctors, medical teams, blood tests. I think the big thing about my story is early detection and staying on top of that game, that way you can find yourself—even if that happens as far as conditioning or illness, disease—the quicker we know, the quicker we can take action. That’s something that really helped me, the fact that I played football, the fact that I had blood tests, physicals; we were able to catch my form of leukemia in the chronic phase, the early stages, and we were able to do something. People are often scared to go to the hospital, they are often scared to go to the doctors and to know exactly what’s going on. We have to get past that fear and we have to push each other to make sure that everything’s OK. Sometimes you have to get a blood count, a blood test, a lab in order to truly know these things and I’m very fortunate for that.”
Reigns also spoke a bit about the Los Angeles Lakers’ recent woes and growing up as a 49ers fan; the segment can be seen below:
(Transcription credit to Bill Pritchard for Wrestlezone.com)
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