Roman Reigns recently spoke with the WWE website about his brother Matt “Rosey” Anoa’i passing away at the age of 47 last week and his plans for Sunday’s WWE pay-per-view. The full interview is at this link and below are highlights:
It’s been a tough two weeks for you personally and professionally. On the personal side, WWE.com sends its condolences to your family. How are you doing and how is everyone else doing?
Right now, it’s one of those situations where it’s a lot of mixed feelings. When you live in a big family, it’s always great to be able to come together, but to have to come together to send off a brother — and not only was he my brother, but in our family, even when you’re cousins, we’re all so close that we feel like brothers. That’s the type of connection we have in our family. It was an extremely sad weekend, and it’s still really tough. Everybody’s grieving. But to see our family come together and have a hundred-plus family and friends come together to celebrate my brother’s life really meant a lot. It just continually picks up our family and keeps us moving on.
Well, once again, we’d like to reiterate our sentiment. We wish your family the best during this hard time.
Thank you. I just want to thank everybody who’s reached out. All my fans, everybody has been so supportive. This is a tough time but like everything in life we can learn from it and get better from it. My only hope now is that I can continue to represent my family and represent my brother and continue to push our legacy. He was my number one fan. He never missed a match, he never missed anything I did in the ring, he always had great advice for me and always reached out to talk. Payback and 2017 and any chance I get to go in that ring I’m representing him.
Speaking of which, last time we saw you on Monday Night Raw was the incident at the hands of Braun Strowman with the ambulance. How are you feeling as you recuperate from that attack?
Physically, I’m as beat up as I am emotionally. This has been two of the roughest weeks of my professional career and life. I’ve never experienced a loss this close since it’s my only blood brother, but I’ve also never experienced a beatdown like Braun Strowman gave me. It’s unfortunate, because whatever point he’s trying to get across, he’s handling it the wrong way. And whether he thinks he’s a monster or not, I’m the top dog, I’m the big dog in this yard. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I already took out the greatest legend of all time. If anybody should be worried, it should be Braun Strowman. He’s got a whole storm of payback that’s about to come his way this Sunday.
