Everybody knows that in the world of professional wrestling a good ring name can go a long way. When Jeff Cobb first joined WWE in May of 2025 he already had an established name, but the company decided to rename him JC Mateo.
While talking about the name change on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Cobb admitted that there was an upside to the name change as he already had ring gear with the initials JC.
“It was great because a bunch of my singlets had the giant JC on the front. I don’t have to buy new singlets. This is great. The day that I flew into St. Louis, well, actually the day of the PLE, Backlash, I went backstage and met everybody, met the writers, and then they gave me two pages of names. I haven’t released them yet, but I think it’s pretty funny. At that time I was like what the hell? The first page, I’ll say it was maybe 60 names on there. I was like okay, this is pretty cool, pretty cool. They’re trying to go into my background with Guam, my background in Hawaii. I was like, okay. Second page, I don’t know what happened. It just started doing random names. I was like, How are they choosing this? One that stuck out made me giggle because it was all caps, JONAH.”
Jeff Cobb then went on to point out that Bronson Reed had previously used the name JONAH before joining WWE. He also revealed that one of the names pitched for him in WWE was Jafar Smash.
“Yeah, by Bronson Reed. The guy that’s in your company. I was like, wait a minute, are you guys even trying now? This is why I really like Drew. After I narrowed it down, I chose the name out of the sheets. I was like, ‘Hey, can I have a copy of this?’ They’re like, why? I was like, ‘Well, I just want to keep it for mementos because I like collecting random, silly things.’
So I brought the list back to the locker room, and Drew was like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is my list of names.’ He’s like, ‘Can I see this?’ Yeah, sure. He looked at them, he’s on the second page. He saw one. He’s like, ‘I like this one.’ I was like, ‘Well, we’re not using that.’ He signed it, so it’s a Drew McIntyre authentic signature, which I’m not gonna sell because it’s funny, but it was Jafar Smash. I said, ‘What?’ So every time I saw Drew without hesitation I was like, ‘What’s up, Drew?’ He’s like, ‘What’s up, Jafar?’ I was like wait, Jafar is neither a Polynesian name, a Hawaiian name, nor a Guam name. I don’t know where that came from.”