Bobby Fish Reveals Secret Inspiration Behind Tag Team Name
Bobby Fish opened up about the creation of his reDRagon team name alongside Kyle O’Reilly.
Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly have been teammates for more than a decade, first forming a partnership in ROH in late 2012. The duo took on the specifically stylized name reDRagon, and speaking in a new interview with Tru Heel Heat Wrestling, Fish opened up about choosing the name and taking surprising inspiration from then-fellow ROH star Davey Richards.
“The name was me. I was reading a book at the time and it was something I took from the book. It was Red Dragons with an S, but I shortened it to just reDRagon and I thought because Kyle and I both did martial arts and we’re trying to be heels, so a couple of little extra detail layers that were things that as a kid, growing up that I loved about wrestling were the details.
“And so I figured, ‘okay reDRagon, anything dragon is very, you know, commercialized, American martial artsy, you know.’ So anything Dragon they’re gonna think like, ‘oh these guys, you know, these two karate guys think they’re dragons’ and you know, reDRagon, I don’t know it just sounded douchey to me. I was like, it’s perfect and then as we’re trying to, I’m trying to come up with a way to like, you know, design what the logo might look like I realized like, ‘oh my God, there’s a D and an R simultaneously in the spelling next to each other.’
“Davey Richards, it’s perfect, it’s perfect, it’ll be all lower case and we’re capitalizing the D and the R and we’re never gonna acknowledge it. We’re never ever going to say that that’s what it is, let people come to their own conclusion.”
Continuing, Fish elaborated on his and O’Reilly’s feud with Richards and why it was “fun” to add layers to the feud with the choice of their tag team name.
“I mean, that’s truly what it was because the way we were coming into things was through a feud with Davey Richards and it was Kyle’s bone to pick with Davey Richards. So it was kind of like that shot at Davey and it put, you know, and I think it was putting some heat and some steam on the thing unspoken, but with Ring of Honor fans between me and Davey gave us a bone of contention because you know, here I kind of, you know, influenced his guy to, you know, further get away from him. So yeah I mean it was just fun to like layer in those details just so much fun.”
reDRagon last teamed together in AEW in the summer of 2022. Fish’s contract with the promotion expired the following August and he departed the company. O’Reilly, meanwhile, has been out with an injury. His last bout took place in June of 2022 when he failed to capture the AEW World Championship from Jon Moxley.
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h/t Fightful