WWE SmackDown Superstar Rick Boogs was recently interviewed by Louis Dangoor of GiveMeSport, where he talked about his name and how it was born.
Boogs initially explained that Rick Boogs was a shortening of his real name since when he was in high school, and that he initially hoped to wrestle under his real name but still finds Rick Boogs unique. He said,
“Originally when I was new to the Performance Center, they wanted us to create personas and pitch names and things of that sort,” Boogs said. “Obviously my name is Eric Bugenhagen, so in high school that, just for jokes, call me Rick Boogs. That’s what my name is short for. So that was one of the names that I pitched, and I cut promos like Ricky B and the Boogs Cruise, all that good stuff. It was fun, it was fun to play around with. And then for my NXT debut, they just went with my real name, even though I was going by Rick Boogs on the Florida shows and stuff. I was like ‘oh, that’s kind of weird, but whatever.’ And then people really liked Bugenhagen. So I was then kind of upset when they changed it back. But it is fun. Rick Boogs I feel like is one of those names where it’s like, I’m not going to say it’s stupid, but I think it’s going to stick because like ‘Rick Boogs?’ It gets people. Everytime people ask me ‘what’s your name?’ ‘Rick Boogs.’ They always go ‘really?’ They don’t really know what I’m saying. You’ve got to reinforce it. Rick Boogs, with the g. I feel like it’s going to stick because of that, because it’s over the top in the sense. Whereas with Bugenhagen it’s just a really cool name.”
While grateful for being praised by AEW wrestler Chris Jericho, Boogs said that he took Jericho’s critical comments over his ring name as a motivation. He continued, “I was definitely for the most part. The only thing that was negative was him saying Rick Boogs was going to hold me back, that name. And I accepted it as a challenge, because I don’t think so. I think Rick Boogs is going to get way more over in a sense. I take that as ‘let’s see what we can do with this name Rick Boogs.’ Like what would we have done with Bugenhagen in that sense? Maybe it could’ve worked, but I think Rick Boogs, it just works better in that sense. He had a lot of praise and I’m very grateful for that, and hopefully I can live up to that. I think that’s what I’m doing. And I just want to prove him wrong in the Rick Boogs schtick.”
You can see the entire interview below:
