*Ron Artest/Metta World Peace has officially changed his name again.
This time the NBA star is dropping the World Peace and taking his original last name and hyphenating it with his wife’s. So now, he’s going by Metta Sandiford-Artest, Complex reports.
Metta revealed his new moniker during an appearance on Inside the Green Room with Danny Green, noting that he flipped the script on his name to honor his wife, Maya Sandiford.
You can hear him talk about it via the clip above starting at the 41:40 spot.
“My name now is ‘Metta Sandiford-Artest.’ I actually took my wife’s last and added it to mine,” he said.
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Ron Artest changes his name again, this time to Metta Ford-Artesthttps://t.co/lkU49HmLqC
— CBS Sports NBA (@CBSSportsNBA) May 5, 2020
Back in 2011, he changed his name from Ron Artest to Metta World Peace.
“Metta is going to be the first name and it means like friendship, love and kindness,” Artest told Stephen A. Smith on 710 ESPNLA at the time. “World Peace is going to be the last name, so everybody can get ready to buy their World Peace jerseys.”
During his conversation with Danny Green, Sandiford-Artest also shared an anecdote about some of the doubts he had right after making the original name change official.
“The first game that I had with ‘World Peace,’ I was like, ‘This is the dumbest thing ever. I was coming off of the bench at that time, in 2011, and they say, ‘Metta World Peace!’ And I remember not wanting to take off my warm up,” he revealed. “It was embarrassing. So I did think about changing my name back, but then I got used, people got used [to] it.”
He also revealed that at one point, he considered changing his name to “Queensbridge” or “So Hood.”
Back in 2014, there were reports that he switched his name to “Panda Friend” when he went to play in China, but Meta says those reports were untrue.
“People said, ‘Metta’s changing his name to ‘Panda Friend!’” he explained. “So, I just rode with it!”
