The Rock: The biggest action star in the world had to get through the WWE first
The Rock is black.
I grew up in the late ’80s and ’90s watching wrestlers who looked like me play thugs and jive-talking ex-cons while losing most of their matches. So The Rock was the black superhero I needed. And as much as he’s relied on his Samoan heritage for a starting point most other black wrestlers haven’t had the benefit of, Dwayne Johnson should be celebrated for thriving and becoming a megastar in the face of, at best, microaggressions and, at worst, outright racism. He’s an All-American heroic movie star now, but bigotry has — all puns intended — colored how he was introduced when he debuted for World Wrestling Entertainment in 1997, and the way he was received when he returned in 2011.
Johnson’s televised WWE debut at New York City’s Madison Square Garden was as “Rocky Maivia.” He won a marquee match for a pay-per-view called Survivor Series. From the moment Johnson hit WWE television he was marked as wrestling’s Next Big Superstar. And why wouldn’t he be? Wrestling’s LeBron James before LeBron James, Johnson was a 6-foot-6, 250-pound University of Miami football national champion (defensive lineman) who was athletic enough to jump from the top rope and leapfrog his opponents in the middle of the ring. Wrestling hadn’t seen anyone with his mix of size and athleticism.
But, even as the first African-American wrestler WWE had ever been really chosen for superstardom, Rocky took a circuitous route to the top. The plan was for Rocky to be a happy-go-lucky “babyface,” or good guy, who would smile and high-five fans in an era when wrestlers such as Stone Cold Steve Austin cursed and raised middle fingers. Soon, crowds began chanting “Die, Rocky, Die.” The Rocky Maivia experiment was dead.
Johnson and the WWE started over by embracing the crowd’s jeers and turning Johnson’s character into a villain. And here’s why it’s difficult to defend any notion that Johnson wasn’t considered “black” during his WWE run: Vince McMahon turned Rocky Maivia into a villain by placing him with the now-defunct and villainous black power faction The Nation Of Domination. The group, consisting of wrestlers nicknamed Farooq and D’Lo Brown among others, was a “Black Panther”/“Nation of Islam” spoof that used pro-black racial slogans (ending many promos with “by any means necessary,” a direct nod to Malcolm X) and spoke on how WWE was holding black wrestlers down. The Rock, though, initially distanced himself from the group’s racial aspects when he joined: “This isn’t about the color of my skin,” he said during a promo on an August 1997 edition of Raw in front of rabidly booing fans. “This is about respect.” Still, his association with The Nation and what they represented infuriated white audiences. The Nation used to put a fist in air at the end of their matches to a chorus of boos.
Rock’s time with The Nation allowed him the freedom to be an amplified version of himself. He ditched the smile and terrible hair. “I’ve got f—ing chia pet on my head as a haircut,” he said in 2016 when looking back at his first match. And he switched from Rocky Maivia to The Rock: a mean-spirited, cocky, Rolex-wearing antagonist who called himself “The People’s Champ” and started ending his promos with the unforgettable “If you smell what the Rock is cooking.”
It was during this time that The Rock became a premier talker, one of the elite promo guys in wrestling history. Eventually, as much as he tried to remain a villain and make wrestling crowds hate him, his charisma was overpowering. By 1998, The Rock was one of the most popular stars in wrestling — although his ability to talk a crowd into a frenzy was a curse for his win/loss record. The Rock would lose matches at almost every major event, and then, on Monday Night Raw episodes, flash his catchphrases and make the crowd forget he ever lost. While this is a testament to his great mic work and his ability to transcend losses, it became infuriating to watch him get pinned so many times.
The Rock’s legendary career is littered with high-profile losses, namely WrestleMania 16 (aka WrestleMania 2000, because everything in the year 2000 had 2000 in its name), in which he was pinned in the main event by rival (on- and off-screen) Triple H. This marked the first time in which a good guy (The Rock) was pinned by a villain at the event. WrestleMania had been seen as WWE’s unofficial season finale in which the hero finally has his hand raised in triumph. All the great heroes had these moments; Hulk Hogan, Austin, Shawn Michaels and Randy Savage celebrated WrestleMania main event wins while confetti fell from the rafters.
That wasn’t the case for Rocky in 2000 or in 2001 when he lost to a newly villainous Stone Cold Steve Austin. Of the 32 WrestleMania main events, bad guys have walked away the winner only four times. The Rock was the good guy who lost two of those matches. The 2001 loss is justifiable: The Rock was on his way to film Scorpion King, and it’s wrestling tradition to lose on the way out. The 2000 loss is harder to stomach. On one hand, the loss was a testament to the aforementioned belief that The Rock’s charisma can withstand any loss no matter how high-profile. It’s also evidence of The Rock being a team player willing to “put wrestlers over” or allow them to look good at his expense when other wrestlers in his position have politicked to make sure they won.
Whatever the case, The Rock was until 2012 the only megastar good guy to not have a WrestleMania main event win since the show’s inception. He returned that year and beat John Cena. To this day, The Rock is the only black wrestler, with except for the actor Mr. T and NFL legend Lawrence Taylor, to ever, in 32 years, have a main event match at WrestleMania. Not seeing The Rock win when he was in his prime feels similar to the Oscar snubs Denzel Washington was experiencing during the same era.
In 2004, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson quit wrestling to become a movie star. As we speak, The Fate of the Furious, the latest installment in one of the most successful and most diverse film franchises ever, is scheduled for an April 14 release. It’s on its eighth episode, and The Rock has starred in four of them. The seven years he spent as a wrestler prepared him to be Hollywood’s biggest action hero by placing in his path just the kind of obstacles and pitfalls he’d face before film cameras. In truth, for The Rock to make it to Hollywood, he had to fight his way through wrestling’s own showbiz universe.
Johnson’s slow exit occurred without announcement or fanfare. He’d actually started scaling back his WWE appearances in 2001. “I never ever wanted to utilize and leverage the WWE to help my movie career, which is why I had to step away,” he said in the 2012 documentary The Epic Journey Of The Rock.
The Rock, even as many fans clamored for his return, was portrayed by some of his former wrestling peers as someone who believed he was too good for wrestling. “Rock,” one anonymous WWE talent texted PWInsider in 2011, “is out for Rock.” Wrestling crowds are loyal, and the idea that someone wanted to move on to something else was an affront to their dedication. There’s a racial component as well: wrestling’s biggest star of color deciding to walk away from mostly white audiences across the country for bigger and better things? For many, it didn’t fly.
Dude wins an NCAAP image award and the first thing he affirms is "yes my dad and grandfather were people of colour" it's like nah really?
dude no one thought you were white and when you are in a room with black/brown faces who uses entertainment industry pc jargon like ppl of colour, you say "us", "African American" or "black". He's just so typical of these phony types that will use the culture if it feels right for the moment but ain't really about the cause.
Its obvious he's not an ally stop claiming this guy like he has anything to do with blax
