During her recent guest appearance on “The Wrestling Classic Casual Conversations” podcast, WWE NXT superstar Karmen Petrovic unveiled the back story of her wrestling alias, which intriguingly has ties to the National Basketball Association.
She explained that her chosen last name, Petrovic, links her to the esteemed NBA player, Drazen Petrovic.
In the podcast, Karmen shared, “Karmen was a name that I thought up myself and was just drawn to, but I didn’t want it to be the typical Carmen with a C; I favored Karmen with a K, partly because my actual name Monika also starts with K. It was also crucial that my parents could easily pronounce it. Of all the other names I toyed with, Karmen resonated with me the most. The creative minds loved it too. They gave us all the creative space we needed and then cherry-picked what they found fitting or what they wanted to incorporate.”
In detailing the decision process behind her last name, she noted, “At first, I was unsure if they’d be amenable to me having an ethnic suffix. There’s this unspoken understanding in WWE that fans need something simple and easy to grasp. Some wrestlers even stick to mononyms. My initial plan was to only go by Karmen, fully forgoing the use of a surname, but I voiced out that, if I were to have a surname, I wanted one that paid homage to my Eastern European heritage. From my understanding, I’m one of the few WWE wrestlers with such roots. It was also essential for me to represent Canada. Despite being introduced from Toronto in the ring, not everyone is aware of my Eastern European heritage. I wanted this part of my lineage to be intertwined in my name. That’s how I landed on Petrovic, inspired by the basketball hero, Dražen Petrović. His fame in Yugoslavia was unparalleled and the respect toward him universal. Also, his name is familiar to American audiences. In this light, I hoped to tread a similar path to him.”
Drazen Petrovic’s NBA career saw him making waves with the Portland Trailblazers and the New Jersey Nets. Sadly, his life was tragically cut short at 28 when he was involved in a fatal accident in Germany in 1993.