The Rock 1972–

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The Rock 1972–

Professional wrestler, actor

Dwayne Johnson, better known as The Rock, is the youngest champion in World Wrestling Federation (WWF) history. Johnson is of Samoan and African-American descent, and his exotic looks—and impressive physique—have helped make him one of the top-earning personalities in his field. His 2000 autobiography, The Rock Says…: The Most Electrifying Man in Sports-Entertainment, spent five months on the New York Times best-seller list, and the following year Johnson made his feature-film debut in The Mummy Returns.

Johnson was born into the world of professional wrestling. His mother, Ata, was the daughter of Peter “High Chief” Maivia, a professional wrestler of Samoan descent who wore traditional South Pacific garb in the ring, wrestled barefoot, and intimidated his opponents with his tribal tattoos. Johnson's parents met when Maivia invited a young black wrestler, Rocky Johnson, to stay overnight at his home after a match. A former boxer, The Rock's father was the first African-American to win wrestling championships in Georgia and Texas when it was still a regional sport with no nationally recognized stars. Rocky Johnson was a formidable opponent in the ring but refused to participate in some of the racist antics that occurred during this era of the sport. Other black wrestlers perpetuated stereotypes, bragging about their abilities in exaggerated slang or even eating watermelon for the television cameras. “My father wouldn't do that,” Johnson wrote in The Rock Says. “He was the first black wrestler to insist on being very intelligent in front of the camera.”

Dreamed of NFL Career

Johnson was born in 1972 in Hayward, California, but moved several times during his youth because of his father's career. He attended schools in Hawaii, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and he was often teased by classmates because of his size and his father's career. He was not deterred, though, from having an early passion for wrestling. “I was fascinated by the business,” he recalled in his memoir. “I loved everything about it: the violence, the theatricality, the athleticism, the volume.” Johnson began lifting weights as a teenager, and by his senior year he was a football star at his Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, high school. He was even named to USA Today's All-American team during his senior year and had his choice of college athletic scholarships. He chose the University of Miami, where he played defensive tackle. The team had a reputation for both playing rough and openly deriding their opponents. Once, a notorious brawl at a game against San Diego State cleared the bench, and footage of Johnson tearing across the field after the opponent's mascot, a man in a giant Aztec warrior costume, was replayed on news broadcasts around the country that night. The incident led the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to impose heavy fines on players who leave the bench to participate in a fight.

Johnson hoped for a career in the National Football League (NFL), but he injured his back and played poorly during his senior year. He was passed over in the NFL draft that year but was offered an opportunity with the Canadian Football League (CFL) instead. In 1995 he became a practice player for the Calgary Stampeders franchise and survived for months on a meager salary of $175 per week. At 6 feet 4 inches and well over 250 pounds, Johnson had a hard time just keeping himself fed on his wages. As he recalled in his autobiography, he often showed up at Stampeder meetings when he knew submarine sandwiches would be served, though the practice players were not required to attend. This abysmal phase of his career came to an end when Stampeders management released him from his contract to make way for a former NFL player.

"Flex Kavana” Era

Johnson returned to Miami, where his college girlfriend, Dany Garcia, lived, and he called his father, who also lived in Florida. He asked his father to begin training him for a career in professional wrestling, to which Rocky Johnson agreed, though not without some trepidation. For the next few months, as Johnson perfected the various locks, flips, and falls that make up professional wrestling's repertoire of moves, he earned money as a personal trainer at a fitness club. With help from a former colleague of his grandfather's, he secured a tryout match for the WWF in Corpus Christi, Texas. He was paired against Steve Lombardi, whose ring name was the Brooklyn Brawler, and won the eight-minute bout in a predetermined decision, along with a contract with the WWF. First, however, Johnson was sent to Memphis to compete in the WWF's second-tier system, the United States Wrestling Alliance. He wrestled in promotional matches under the name Flex Kavana, earning $40 per night during the summer of 1996.

In August of that year Johnson was given another tryout, this time against a well-known wrestler, Owen Hart (whose accidental death in 1999 devastated Johnson), and two weeks later he received a phone call summoning him to WWF headquarters and training facilities in Connecticut. Elated, Johnson packed his apartment and drove away within an hour of receiving the news. He made his official WWF debut, as Rocky Maivia, at Madison Square Garden on November 16, 1996, in its “Survivor Series,” entering the ring as a “babyface”—wrestling parlance for a good guy. But this was a much different era compared with his grandfather's or even his father's day: The WWF had consolidated all the regional federations and, with live spectacles that attracted sellout crowds and savvy marketing strategies, had made pro wrestling a multimillion-dollar business. Moreover, wrestlers openly admitted that their moves are choreographed and the outcomes predetermined, which had remained unspoken in the 1980s.

The People's Champion

Johnson won his first WWF championship in February of 1997—making him, at twenty-four, the youngest ever to win a belt. But his prowess did not make him a favorite with live audiences, who had become far more aggressive during the 1990s and liked to boo “Rocky.” After a knee injury forced him to take a few months off, Johnson strategized with WWF writers to revamp his ring persona. The Rock debuted on August 11, 1997, in a Jackson, Mississippi, event and was introduced as an ally of the Nation of Domination, a coalition of “heel” (bad-guy) wrestlers that drew upon Black Panther history for inspiration. Through more plot twists, The Rock regained or lost the WWF title several more times.

At a Glance …

Born Dwayne Douglas Johnson on May 2, 1972, in Hayward, CA; son of Rocky Johnson and Ata (Maivia) Johnson; married Dany Garcia (a financial services executive), 1997. Education: University of Miami, B.S., 1995.

Career: Canadian Football League's Calgary Stampeders, practice team, 1995; signed with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), 1996, debuted as Rocky Maivia, 1996, debuted as The Rock, August 11, 1997; made television appearances on DAG, Star Trek: Voyager, and That '70s Show; actor in films, 2001—.

Addresses: Home—Miami, FL. Office—World Wrestling Federation, Inc., 1241 E. Main St., Stamford, CT 06902.

The WWF writers devised storylines for The Rock and his foes such as Triple H, a wrestler named Paul Leveque, and pitted them in various battles against each other. Johnson, responsible for fleshing out the character further through dialogue, kept a notebook with him in order to jot down ideas and new putdowns as they come to him. As a heel, The Rock arrogantly browbeat his opponents outside of the ring before the cameras. “The character of The Rock is perpetually defiant, perpetually talking or glaring,” observed Miami Herald writer Peter Whoriskey, “and calls himself ‘The People's Champion,’ a moniker that has nearly unlimited spinoffs. There is ‘The People's Eyebrow,’ a trademark gesture in which he lifts one indignant and threatening eyebrow. ‘The People's Elbow’ is a basic flying elbow move that Johnson dresses up by tossing his elbow pad into the crowd, waving his arms dramatically, and bouncing off the ropes a few times before delivering the blow.” Johnson himself believes The Rock's over-the-top persona appeals to many: “There are a lot of people who live vicariously through the WWF characters—like The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin,” he told the Miami Herald. “What I think some of them want is to be able to put people down—like their bosses—and then get away with it.”

A Multimedia Star

Johnson's success and name recognition as a pro wrestler rivaled that of Hulk Hogan during the 1980s. He was only the second wrestler in the history of Saturday Night Live to host the show—Hogan was the first—and even appeared on the cover of Newsweek. He gained further fame with the success of his 2000 autobiography, authored with Joe Layden. The Rock Says spent twenty weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and attracted the attention of Hollywood producers. Johnson's performance as the Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns (2001) led to an offer to reprise the role in a prequel, The Scorpion King.

In the summer of 2000 Johnson spoke before the Republican National Convention. He talked about the need for voter registration, noting that “fourteen million eligible voters watch The Rock every single week,” according to the New York Times, and then introduced Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (and former wrestling coach) J. Dennis Hastert to the delegates. At the end of the year Johnson was named one of People magazine's “25 Most Intriguing People of 2000.” He asserted, however, that he harbored no desire to enter politics, as one former wrestler, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, had done. As Johnson told St. Petersburg Times writer Jim Varsallone, his experience at the convention and the contested presidential election later that year made him far more interested in politics, but from a distance. “Quite frankly I follow it closely now, but as far as running for any type of office, I think I'll leave that to the politicians,” Johnson told the paper. “I think I'm too outspoken at times, and I might get myself in trouble.”

Dropped “The Rock”

Following The Scorpion King, Johnson continued working in the action-adventure genre, starring in The Rundown in 2003 as a bounty hunter pursuing his quarry in the Brazilian rain forest. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Scott Brown gave it a mixed review for a hackneyed plot and claimed even the love-interest subplot with Rosario Dawson was “all just an excuse for The Rock to dish out disciplined beat-downs, looking ever-sleek but never preening.” The Entertainment Weekly writer became one of the first among many to hail Johnson as the newest Hollywood action-hero and the obvious successor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but he noted that the former wrestler was proving even better. “No Arnold throwback, he's a new beast, the action beefcake as metrosexual,” Brown wrote.

In 2004 Johnson starred in a remake of the 1973 classic Walking Tall, playing a veteran of a U.S. military special forces unit who returns to civilian life and his hometown to find it overrun by criminals. A year later he appeared in a supporting role in the Elmore Leonard crime-story adaptation Be Cool, which starred John Travolta and Uma Thurman, and he took a larger part in the big-screen adaptation of Doom, the popular video game. He also starred as the football coach at a juvenile detention camp in Gridiron Gang, but his biggest film project in 2006 was not released until a year-and-a-half later after being booed at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. Director Richard Kelly, of Donnie Darko fame, then cut nineteen minutes from Southland Tales for its 2007 theatrical release.

The dark comedy—set in 2008 when America is fighting World War III on five separate fronts and has descended into a repressive, neoconservative near-dictatorship after a nuclear holocaust—might have even been construed as Johnson's new form of political commentary. Southland Tales had several intertwined plots, but the main one featured Johnson as Boxer Santaros, a former actor once prominent in Republican Party politics who disappears then returns with an apparent case of amnesia. Aided by Sarah Michelle Gellar's porn star character, the unlikely hero peddles a screenplay in Hollywood while revolutionary elements gear up for battle in Venice Beach. Reviewing the new version of the film for the San Francisco Chronicle, Ruthe Stein termed the byzantinely plotted Southland Tales still “a mess,” but commended Johnson's performance. “As a Schwarzenegger-type action star, Johnson may be playing to type, but he's awfully good. Johnson's eyes jut around and he puts his fingers together as if in prayer when his movie star begins to piece together what happened while he had amnesia.” Johnson rounded out 2007 with a much lighter film, The Game Plan, a family comedy in which he played a talented and egotistical professional foot- ball player who finds out he has an eight-year-old daughter.