How The Rock Went from Depressed Football Player to Hollywood Mogul

Life

“The problem with Dwayne was there was a guy named Warren Sapp who came along the next year,” said Defensive Line Coach Ed Orgeron.

Warren Sapp would go on to be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2013.

“When he was [first] there, I was a tight end in high school and I got [to Miami] as a tight end and linebacker, and they moved me over to D-line,” Sapp remembers. “I was real reluctant to do so. I thought I was a pretty good tight end and a pretty good athlete, but being 290 pounds, they moved me to D-line and said, ‘We need you to rush the passer or you can go home.’ So I came into the D-line room and sat down, and Dwayne Johnson walks in and says, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I’m here for your job.’ So that’s how me and him had our introduction to each other. I said it jokingly, but I was there for his job.”

Whether it was his middling statistics or his lowered rank in the pecking order on the team, Johnson found himself wrestling with symptoms of depression.

“I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “I didn’t want to do a thing, I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was crying constantly. Eventually you reach a point where you are all cried out.”

Johnson graduated from Miami in 1995 with a Bachelor of General Studies degree in criminology and physiology but he wasn’t quite ready to give up on his football dreams despite the lack of interest from the NFL. He ultimately joined the Calgary Stampede as a backup linebacker but was cut two months into the season.

“The dreams I had, they’re dashed,” he revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. “There is no more football. My relationship was crushed. That was my absolute worst time.”

As a rambunctious teenager, Dwayne Johnson turned to the physicality of building up his body and ultimately football to overcome a rocky patch at home. Once again forced to sift through the rubble that was his life, it seemed only natural for him to once again look inward at what made him special; his wrestling pedigree.

Johnson made his WWF debut in 1996, fighting under the shared moniker of his father and grandfather’s names, “Rocky Maivia.” As fate would have it, he would square off against the Brooklyn Brawler – who was also the first opponent of his father – at a Superstars taping in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The Brooklyn Brawler remembered Johnson as, “a skinny little kid with an afro.”

“For me, I wasn’t just having ‘a tryout match,” because I had never actually had a real match in my life. Ever,” Johnson remembered. “WWE thought that I already had multiple matches under my belt, but little did they know. What they also didn’t know was that I was broke as hell and didn’t actually own wrestling gear – no boots, knee pads or most importantly.. wrestling trunks. I went to Sports Authority and bought some bright ass white volleyball knee pads, called my Uncle and asked if he had any trunks I could use for my tryout.”

Although he eventually found success in the ring – notably grabbing the intercontinental title from Triple H while wrestling on Monday Night Raw – his reception amongst fans was tepid at best.

Following a knee injury, Johnson refused to try and win back the adoration of the crowd. Instead, he became a member of the “Nation of Domination” alongside Faarooq, D’Lo Brown and Kama where he embraced the “heel” aspect of professional wrestling. And just like that, the wrestler who favored talking about himself in the third-person was born. Rocky Maivia was now just, “The Rock.”

For a year, The Rock served as a thorn in the side for notable Superstars like Steve Austin, Triple H and Mankind. The Nation of Domination would essentially be disbanded after a feud with fellow member, Mark Henry, as Vince McMahon and co. were quickly realizing that The Rock would be better suited to stand on his own rather than be sold to the public as part of a collective.

The Rock dominated wrestling coverage and storylines for the better part of a decade – finding the charismatic pugilist holding the WWF/WWE championship belt eight-times during that stretch. But Johnson wanted something more; a chance at Hollywood stardom.

Although notable wrestlers like Rowdy Roddy Piper, Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan had made the jump in the past, they always knew their bread was best buttered inside the ring.

“When I was a kid, Harrison Ford at that time was my favorite actor,” Johnson said. “He was so cool! Tough. Flirted with the girls. I wanted to be that guy. Well, I also wanted to be Elvis Presley at the time. And at the same time, I’m also thinking that I want to be Chuck Norris back then, too. So you take all those men, roll them up, and that was what was happening [in my head].”

Johnson ultimately got his start when he made his Hollywood debut in 2001 in The Mummy Returns.

Kotaku noted, “Casting The Rock as an unintelligible half-naked warrior who later turns into a half-man, half-scorpion monster painted with some truly awful early 21st century CGI was pretty much the perfect way to introduce the man to the non-WWE watching universe.”

Although it was a minor role, producers and directors alike saw the potential.

“Most wrestlers have been straight-forward characters or amped up versions of the real individual,” Adi Shankar, producer of The Grey and an avid wrestling fan, told TheWrap. “Hulk Hogan acted in a bunch of B-movies playing Hulk Hogan.”

Rather than just be the “tough guy,” The Rock opted to play the straight man opposite of Sean William Scott in The Run Down and a gay character in Be Cool in addition to adding family films to his resume with The Tooth Fairy and Journey to the Center of the Earth 2.

“Stone Cold would get over because he’d beat everyone up. Shawn Michaels was one of the greatest wrestlers of all time. Mick Foley would just do crazy stuff,” Shankar said. “The Rock got over because he was funny. You take humor out of the Rock and you don’t have anything.”

In 2015, The Rock once again earned the distinction of being the top-grossing actor in all of Hollywood based off the strength of his work in San Andreas and Fast & Furious 7.

“Only way to start this post is with ‘Thank You,’” said Johnson on Instagram. “World’s #1 international box office star. I was blessed with this title in 2013 and now again in 2015. $1.48billion is a lot of revenue to generate in our business in only one year, but it’s also the important reminder that regardless of what we achieve in life, we always gotta keep striving for more, staying hungrier than the rest and being grateful around every corner.”