What We Learned from Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson's 2000 Autobiography 'The Rock Says...'

Thing is, The Rock’s story isn’t actually that interesting. A lot of wrestlers, from Ric Flair to Daniel Bryan, had really interesting journeys to stardom. The Rock however, got into wrestling because his dad was former WWF tag team champion Rocky Johnson, and his granddad was Samoan grappling legend ‘High Chief’ Peter Maivia. And he was fast-tracked to the top.  He’s kind of the Miley Cyrus of wrestling.

So what tales does the book spin? We start out with The Rock growing up in Hawaii, and it’s standard anodyne biographical stuff. We find out that his “mom was the real rock of the family”, and he shares a genuinely heart-warming anecdote about his granddad beating up some guys. Key quotes from opening chapter: “There is nothing The Rock finds more offensive than racism… but more on that later”. When he was eight, he did a piledriver on one of his friends and made him cry. 

Chapter two though. It’s entitled “The People’s Puberty”. Yeah, really. Want to hear the story of how The Rock lost his virginity? “When it came to fighting and fornicating, I was way ahead of the curve”. The Rock tells us that he’s “always been attracted to older women, often they reciprocated.” Rocky popped his cherry when he was just 14, to a high school senior named Maria. He convinced her he was “a hunka-hunka burnin’ love,” and they did it for the first time out in the open at a public park. And then a cop car came and told them to stop half way through.

“Not only did I attract the attention of older women. I seemed to get a rise out of men. Older boys, actually.” That’s how the next chapter begins. Teenage Dwayne got beaten up by a load of older kids. Which is crazy. What kind of idiots try and start a fight with The Rock? Did they never watch Smackdown in the early 00s? Or Fast 6? They get the jump on him, because he’s a still young kid, but then young Dwayne’s pro-wrestler dad went and sorted them out.

Anyway, The Rock then went to college in Miami to play football. Injury ravaged his college football career, but he once get into a fight with the San Diego Aztecs mascot (a dude dressed as Aztec warrior) during a Miami Hurricanes game, and chased him along the sidelines. Sadly, the WWE never picked up on that storyline, and have the mascot do a run in on one of his matches.

The Rock dreamed of making to the NFL, but things never quite worked out. Instead, he ended up in Canadian Football League. He was paid so little for the Calgary Stampeders that he had to sleep on a piss-stained second-hand hotel mattress, and steal sandwiches. Things were not working out the way The Rock planned, so he headed back to the US, and decided to become a professional wrestler. With his dad’s connections in the business, he quickly got a try-out with the WWE and had his first match not in a dive bar or a sparsely attend high-school gym, but at a big TV taping . The Rock would grasp this opportunity and go on to be both the greatest wrestler and greatest actor of all time, so I don’t really want to gripe about nepotism, but it doesn’t really give the book much of a “triumph over adversity” narrative.

He would wrestle his try-out in trunks borrowed off a WCW veteran called Meng, who is describes as sweet and kind-hearted, but is best known for once biting a guy’s nose off in an airport. It’s at this point the book is interrupted by a insert of colour photos, including The Rock as an eight year old with an incredible afro, hanging with Andre The Giant and “Classy” Freddie Blassie. Best of all though is a generic modern day press photo, with the brilliant caption “The Rock filming his Chef Boyardee commercial on South Beach, Florida”.

Eventually, Dwayne Johnson develops the arrogant bad guy persona of “The Rock,” which would make him a superstar in the WWE. It’s at this point the book’s font changes, and The Rock starts narrating the book in third person, as his wrestling character. The Rock did this. The Rock did that. It’s supposed to be like a wrestling promo, but as charismatic as The Rock is talking, it’s nigh-on unreadable written down. 

We’ve still got a third of the book to go, and we’re basically at the (then) present day. It flips between those unreadable third person, with normal chapters about Dwayne Johnson doing things. A day in the life of The Rock tells us that The Rock spends 9.00pm to 9.15pm “getting pumped.” There are photos of him with Boyz II Men and Shaq. He gets annoyed about the young son of a maid sneaking into his hotel room. The book does end with a dramatic finisher like The People’s Elbow, but with a whimper.

So yeah, it’s pretty terrible. It’s also really badly formatted, with about four different fonts used, and grainy black and white photos (in the chapter about the late, great Owen Hart, a miniature Rock is photoshopped into Owen’s hands, for some reason). The thing is I genuinely love The Rock. The Rock is amazing. Basically, what happened was that in 1999, the WWE published Mick Foley’s autobiography and it was shock bestseller (it’s also shockingly good, and probably the only book by a wrestler a normal person ever needs to read). Because of that book’s success, the WWE quickly churned ghostwritten autobiographies of their top stars, regardless whether they’d done anything interesting in their lives yet. If The Rock wrote a book now, it could be genuinely interesting. The guy is a legit pop culture icon, and worthy of a biography. Even more so if he waited another 15 years. But this book is not good, y’all.

Still, there’s a chapter actually called “The People’s Puberty”. That’s gotta be worth something.