Carmelo Anthony reveals the hilarious reason why he tried to change his name to something completely different
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Carmelo Anthony has got a lot of nicknames, doesn’t he?
You’ve got Melo, Hoodie Melo, Mel, and of course, Sweet Melon. Because no name quite rolls off the tongue the same way when you think of the name ‘Carmelo’.
But, this was almost not the case… okay that may be a bit of an overstatement. But, it is true that a younger version of the Lakers star wasn’t the biggest fan of his own name.
Oh yes, we’re serious. Let’s get into it.
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Carmelo Anthony tried to change his name to Tyrone Johnson in third grade
No, we did not try to look for the most stereotypical colored name out there. Carmelo Anthony really did want to change his name to Tyrone Johnson at one point in his life.
Why? Well, here is what he explained to be the reason behind all this, during his appearance on the ‘Armchair expert’ podcast.
“I’m in 3rd grade. I’m coming from New York,” said the Lakers star. Nobody knows who the hell I am [in Baltimore]. I come the summer of ’92. School starts in September. So I have two months to meet some people, hang out. Mind you, I’m 8 or 9 years old at this point. When I get to 3rd grade, first day of school you gotta write your name on a white index card.
That whole summer, people was butchering my name. It was just like ‘Caramelo’ and ‘Camelo’. “There wasn’t no nothing bad to it. I just didn’t like people f–ing my name up. … So I write the name ‘Tyrone’ and I’m looking around and I’m like ‘what last name am I gonna go with?’ So I see a textbook and it’s like ‘Johnson’ and something textbook. So I’m like, ‘Tyrone Johnson’.”
To be fair to the guy, if someone butchered our name as hard as they did his, we’d want to change our name too.
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