What's the process for professional athletes to have a name change?

You can get a nickname even without trying.

Changing your legal name (for anyone, at least in the USA) is just a matter of filling out a form and paying a fee for processing (and then letting everyone who needs to know, who has your old name, know your new name).

@Zaku
here in Georgia, to change a legal name, it is much more complicated.

You make a petition to the Country court, pay $400 or so. Then it is advertised in the legal organ of the county for 4 weeks. (old version of name, new version of name)

Before the name change is final you have to appear in County court, before a judge, and swear that your are not changing names in order to commit fraud or escape prosecution. Only then is the name officially changed.

Perhaps where you live it is simpler. Here it is a multi-week rigamarole.

The same process as for anyone else.

There is a huge difference between your “legal” name & your “nickname”. His dad gave him the nickname Deebo when he was a little boy & it stuck. Deebo was a character in his dad’s favorite movie Friday as he felt his son was a bully just like the character with that name in the movie. Tyshun is Samuel’s given first name, but he has been known as Deebo for years, so what people call him isn’t relevant to his legal status. I’m sure that any “legal” papers are signed off with the name of Tyshun Samuel, so it doesn’t matter what he’s called. I’ve never seen his DL but it reads as Tyshun Samuel as well, but everybody at the DMV calls him Deebo. He wouldn’t need to do a legal name change unless he wanted to start processing all his legal stuff under his nickname.

Sports teams are pretty lenient about using nick names. George Herman Ruth was universally know as “Babe”, Most people over the age of thirty know of Lawrence Peter Berra as “Yogi”.

Samuel was given the nickname “Deebo” by his father, Galen, after the character Deebo played by Tiny Lister Jr. in the 1995 movie Friday.

@elbanditoroso Exactly. My son just changed his name. It was about a 6–8 week process of filing papers, having his name appear in a local paper for a certain amount of time and paying a fee to do so, paying $200 for the name change, and appearing in court to finalize it. Luckily our fee here in Wisconsin is less than where you are at and he was able to appear before the judge on Zoom from home.