Roman Reigns spoke candidly about finding out he had leukemia and the changes it brought to his life.
During his first reign as Universal Champion in October of 2018, Roman Reigns shocked the world by announcing that he had leukemia and would be forced to relinquish his title to undergo treatment. He went into remission in early 2019 and returned to WWE that February.
This wasn’t his first bout with the disease, as he was originally diagnosed in 2007 while he was signed to the Minnesota Vikings. Speaking on the latest episode of Logan Paul’s IMPAULSIVE podcast, Roman Reigns recalled how he found out something was wrong after undergoing a physical, though they weren’t sure what was wrong at first.
“We weren’t quite sure… this is where we saw the blood labs that showed the elevated white blood cells, which clearly says your body’s attacking something. It’s fighting off something. So they were like, yeah, it could be anything. Yeah, I mean, venereal disease, infection, to cancer. And then I’m just… all I heard was cancer and like, whoa, it got super heavy. So I had to go home from there.
“So that was rookie camp. I got up to Minnesota, did rookie camp woke up before practice, we did all the blood labs and everything, all the, you know, standard physicals that you do. Went through practice; it was a non-padded practice, but it’s still, you know, you’re doing some stuff, you know, you’re still competing.
“Had a fairly good practice, and then we watch film. As soon as I came out of film, the whole training staff was right there. I’m looking like man, hopefully it’s this guy behind me that they’re getting but no, they were pointing at me, and yeah.”
When asked what his reaction was to the news that he was indeed dealing with cancer, Roman Reigns admitted that he compartmentalized his emotion and that it didn’t feel real.
“So I compartmentalize emotion sometimes. So I think it was just so overwhelming that it wasn’t even believable, you know, and even then it was like, this is back in ’07. So this is years ago, and like, you hear about younger people with blood cancers more often now.
“But back then a 21 year old, you know, I mean, coming straight out of college, a division one football player, supposed to be kind of peak health, right? Like, you never would expect that. So it put a huge asterisk next to my name when it came to the NFL. So it was just an uphill battle from there, man.”
Because of his diagnosis, Roman Reigns’ time with the Minnesota Vikings came to an end, and he spoke about being released from the team.
“Yeah, they sent me home. Once we got like all the proper oncology work back in the bloodwork back. They ended up releasing me just because there was just I mean, there was nothing we could do at that point.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Roman Reigns discussed “blanking” on the microphone with John Cena during a 2017 promo.
If you use any quotes from this transcription, please credit IMPAULSIVE and link back to this article with a h/t to Inside the Ropes.