Viewing Dwayne Johnson’s life solely in a contemporary context in which he sits atop a mountaintop alongside luminaries like Robert Downey Jr., Jackie Chan and Tom Cruise as some of the highest-earning actors in all of Tinseltown doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s akin to the finishing move in wrestling that gets fans on their feet, not the years of practice that went into perfecting it.
While audiences in cinemas around the world recognize him for his million dollar smile and rippling biceps which he uses to continually save the world from evil, his ascent from teenage delinquent, to football player, to wrestler and finally Hollywood mogul is still hard to fathom despite a now several-billion-dollar pedigree at the Hollywood box office.
There were several instances and arrests that could have defined Dwayne Johnson and forced him down not only a path of incarceration, but also could have limited him to a wrestling lifestyle which has claimed countless lives due to the demands of the road, and the bodily injuries that are often healed through self-medication in the sport.
But they didn’t.
Dwayne Johnson spent much of his childhood bouncing between homes in California and New Zealand. To say that wrestling was “in his blood” would be a gross understatement. His father, Rocky Johnson, continued the family lineage first started by his grandparents, Peter and Lia Maivia, who were responsible for building Polynesian Pacific Pro Wrestling and who also had close “blood” ties to the legendary Anoaʻi family who counted Rikishi, Yokozuna, Roman Reigns and The Usos as would-be wrestlers.
When Johnson was 14, the family relocated to Honolulu while his father bounced around the wrestling circuits for the WWF.
Despite his father’s success in the ring – where he and partner Tony Atlas became the fist black tag-team duo to hold a championship belt as “The Soul Patrol” – the family’s financial security was anything but guaranteed. After a string of monetary woes which included his mother’s car being repossessed, the Johnson’s hit a “bottom” that was a million miles away from what would become his signature wrestling finish.
“We were living in an efficiency that cost $120 a week,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We come home, and there’s a padlock on the door and an eviction notice. My mom starts bawling. She just started crying and breaking down. ‘Where are we going to live? What are we going to do?'”
Ultimately, the family’s financial disrepair forced Dwayne Johnson down a destructive path as a teenager.
“In Waikiki there’s a couple high-end blocks where there’s your Prada, Chanel, Gucci, Armani, jewellery stores, plenty of jewellery stores,” he said. “There are a lot of tourists that come into Waikiki and there’s a lot of money. A lot of foreign money that comes in, and we were part of a theft ring that would target those groups. We would target the money, we would target the high-end clothes and we would target the jewellery – turn around and sell it, best we could.”
Although he dabbled in theft which often landed him in police custody, he also had the epiphany that one of the few things he could control in the world that didn’t need financial resources was how he carried himself.
“It was about, ‘What can I control with these two hands?’ he said. “The only thing I could do was train and build my body. The successful men I knew were men who built their bodies.”
By the time Johnson was 16 years old, he was 6’4 225lbs. He continued to bounce around high schools in the States including stops at Glencliff and McGavock High Schools in Nashville, TN before a final stop at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, PA where he would finally put that ample frame to good use on the football field.
“I had a very bad mustache and a chip on my shoulder,” he said.
Johnson didn’t actually seek out the gridiron. Rather, his teenage stubbornness had a lot to do with it. During school one day, he chose to use the teacher’s lounge bathroom rather than the one reserved for students.
“A teacher comes in,” Johnson remembers. “His name is Jody Cwik. Tough guy. He says, ‘Hey, you can’t be in here.’ I kind of pause, look over my shoulder [and say], ‘Okay, I’ll leave when I’m done.’ And I continue to wash my hands. He looked at me, didn’t say a word, but he was fuming.”
That same night, Johnson pontificated on his behavior and decided to seek Cwik out to rectify his actions.
“I felt bad,” he said. “I just felt bad.”
Johnson found Cwik the next day and offered an apology.
“He shook my hand. I’ll never forget that shake—he wouldn’t let it go—[and he] said, ‘I want you to do something for me. … I want you to come out and play football for me.’ And I went out, and I played football for Jody Cwik. He was our head football coach, and he became a father figure to me and mentor.”
As Johnson quickly flourished on the football field as an agile defensive lineman, other areas in his life began to improve as well.
“My grades got better, and I started getting recruited from every college across the country,” he said. “My thought process started to change. That’s when I started thinking about goals and what I wanted to accomplish.”
Johnson credits much of his success at an early age to Coach Cwik.
“I love that man. I’ll never forget the impact that he had on my life,” Johnson says. “My takeaway from that amazing relationship that I had was the empathy that he had for a punk kid who treated him so rudely and disrespectfully. He looked past that BS and said, ‘I believe in you and I want to turn you around.’”
After a successful high school career, Johnson accepted a scholarship to play football at the University of Miami under Coach Dennis Erickson. Although he would win a National Championship, he played sparingly – starting only once and appearing in 39 games with a total of 77 tackles and 4.25 sacks.
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