Reggie overcame a criminal environment to get to WWE

Sidney “Iking” Bateman, better known as Reggie in WWE, didn’t have it easy growing up.

He never knew his father and his mother died when he was 3 years old. He and his seven siblings were raised by a grandmother who worked hard to house and feed them. Hearing gunshots in his neighborhood was commonplace, as was gun violence and deaths at home due to multiple members of his family being in a gang.

“He was going in the wrong direction,” Reggie recalled. “I liked the gangs, the violence, the drugs, because that’s what I saw for my uncles, my brothers and the kids in the neighborhood,” he told the St Louis Today.

At 16, he joined a gang, but during his freshman year of high school, a close friend was shot and killed by a rival gang member, and the heartbreak was a breaking point for Reggie.

Shortly after, he entered the world of acrobatics thanks to a school program and joined Circus Harmony, where he had found a new community.

“It became who I was,” he said. “It became what I was recognized for in St. Louis, I was no longer affiliated with anything gang related. They didn’t see me as the younger brother of two gang members; They saw me as the guy who does cartwheels. The guy who is in the circus,” said the fighter.

Bateman came to join Cirque du Soleil and after several years visiting different parts of the world, the opportunity came to visit the WWE Performance Center in Orlando, Florida, which was too good for Reggie, even though he had never seen professional wrestling. Live.

By January 2020, Reggie had left Cirque du Soleil and signed with WWE. It was one of the rare cases where a newly signed talent debuted almost immediately on a main roster show, in his case Raw.

Now he is preparing to be part of the Royal Rumble in his hometown of St. Louis.

“To now return to one of the biggest pay-per-views of the year and take part in the Royal Rumble is… I am speechless,” said Reggie. “Those are stories you hear in the movies and on TV. It’s crazy and surreal to say that this is real life, but I’m living it,” he said.