6 Things We Learned From Samoa Joe On Sam Roberts' Wrestling Podcast

3. He Has A Pretty Good Trademark Lawyer

Samoa Joe NXT
WWE.com

Kevin Steen became Kevin Owens. El Generico became Sami Zayn. Prince Devitt became Finn Balor. PAC became Neville, and Chris Harris became Braden Walker. Samoa Joe? Well, much like CM Punk, he somehow managed to make the transition to the big leagues whilst keeping the name that made him famous in the process.

The topic is brought up on the podcast, and Joe responds on a couple of occasions by chuckling and referring to him having a 'really good trademark lawyer'. That might be true, but there's also 10+ years of brand building and name recognition already done, so it turns out it was a situation that benefits all parties.

Samoa Joe works best as Samoa Joe, he will sell more merchandise as Samoa Joe (it was the merch sales that led to his initial part-time deal with WWE getting bumped to full-time) and he will continue to be Samoa Joe.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.