Did Dwayne Johnson Really Call Wrestling Fake When He Was Younger?
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson may very well be the most successful pro wrestler of all time. While it could be argued that others like Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold Steve Austin had more successful careers in the ring, no other wrestler has turned his WWE clout into real Hollywood fame like Dwayne Johnson has. He went from making all the jabronies of the Attitude Era smell what The Rock was cooking to a star of the silver screen, playing the leading man in action flicks like Rampage, San Andreas, and Skyscraper, and has even shown off his comedy chops on Saturday Night Live and in movies like the new Jumanji series.
His life before his legendary rise to the top of the entertainment world is now the subject of the new NBC series, Young Rock, and some of the things it reveals about the superstar have people wondering how true the show is to the superstar's real life. For example, when he was a kid, did The Rock really say that wrestling is — ahem — fake, as we saw in the pilot episode? Let's take a look into the eyebrow-raising pro wrestler's past to see how accurate Young Rock really is.
The scene was loosely based on an experience from Dwayne Johnson's life
According to his official WWE bio, The Rock was the first-ever third-generation wrestler in the promotion's history. He grew up surrounded by professional wrestlers, so it makes sense that we'd see him as a young whippersnapper among famous grapplers like the Junkyard Dog and Andre the Giant. In the pilot episode of Young Rock, we see a 10-year-old Dwayne get a talking-to from Andre the Giant after he mumbles that the sport is fake. Andre picks the boy up and tells him not to use "the F word."
However, Screen Rant reports that the scene may be the result of some scriptwriters taking a few liberties with the actor's admittedly star-studded life. The scene was inspired by a similar story from The Rock's past, but not one in which he was the one using such filthy language. Apparently, a young Dwayne Johnson got angry at a fellow student who called wrestling fake, and he performed a rather rough move on the guy to show him that it isn't. "Unfortunately, that's a true story," Johnson admitted on social media. "His name was Randy E and I piledrived him on the gym floor and got in huge trouble." So it looks as though a young Rock may not have been the one to profane wrestling by using the F word, but who knows? Maybe he was taught that lesson the same way he showed Randy E.