WWE Hall of Famer Booker T appeared on his The Hall of Fame Podcast this week and set the record straight on something important — his real name is not Robert. The former world champion said that certain sources on the internet have claimed for years that his first name is Robert, when in reality his full name is Booker T. Huffman Jr.
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He explained, “A lot of people think my name is Robert because of what they see on the internet,” he said. “My real name is Booker T. Huffman Jr. That’s what’s on my birth certificate. I don’t know where Robert Teal Huffman Jr came in. I tell people all the time that I hated my name as a kid. Kids are cruel and they used to call me booger all the time, and I used to get in fights daily because I would have to say, ‘My name is Booker, not booger.’”
“I thought, ‘When I turn 18 years old, I’m changing my name’, because I couldn’t take the ridicule from kids. Then when I turned 18, I thought, ‘That’s not too bad of a name. I’ll hold on to it.’ Now I look at all those suckas who ridiculed me as a kid about my name, Booker T, 2-time Hall of Famer, 6-time World Champ, 35 titles and all that stuff, and still doing it. Booker T is a bad, bad man. So the name, it fits,” he continued (h/t WrestlingNews.co).
Booker first broke out on the national stage in WCW in the 90s as one-half of the Harlem Heat tag team, winning the WCW World Tag Team Championships a whopping 10 times. He pivoted to a singles career in the late 90s and would go on to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship four times before the company shuttered in 2001. In the years that followed he would join the WWE, pick up a fifth WCW world title reign, reinvent himself as King Booker, win the World Heavyweight Championship and work for TNA (Impact Wrestling) for three years before returning to WWE as an onscreen character. He was first inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2013, then again in 2019 as one-half of Harlem Heat.
