On Friday, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shared the eulogy that he gave at the funeral for his late father, Rocky Johnson, with a nearly 11-minute video posted to his Instagram account. Also included in that video are old photos and clips of his dad, in addition to footage of the proceedings.
Rocky died last month of a heart attack. He was 75.
“I wish I had one more shot,” Dwayne began his tribute. “I wish I had one more shot to say goodbye … to say I love you, to say thank you, but I have a feeling he’s watching. He’s listening.”
The eulogy expanded to include the moment that the actor learned about his dad's death.
“I was on my way to work, the other day on Jan. 15 and I was just pulling into work and we were shooting that day and it was the very first day of production,” he said, according to PEOPLE.
He said that his wife, Lauren, called and told him about something "going on with your dad.”
"I’m literally just pulling in and I’m looking at the whole crew, hundreds of guys and women milling around, carrying equipment and waving at me in the truck, and I’m waving back and it all got really foggy and it seemed like it was a big dream,” he shared. “You know how you have those moments where you try and shake yourself out of it, and you’re like ‘No, it’s not a dream. … My dad’s gone.’”
“In that moment, I just thought ‘Well, what do I need to do? What’s the next thing that I need to do?' And I heard a voice say, ‘Well, hey, the show must go on,’ and that was my dad. That was my old man who told me that."
He also talked about his father's legacy, which includes paving the way for a more diverse wrestling community. To do so he shared anecdotes from his dad's days on tour 50 years prior.
“The other side to it that I wanted to point out that I thought was important to say is that when somebody is a trailblazer that means that they actually, they have the ability to change behavior and audience’s behavior, people’s behavior,” he recalled. “And for my dad, when he broke into the business in the mid ’60s and throughout the late ’60s and into the ’70s in the United States where racial tension and divide was very strong and in the ’60s and the ’70s you have a black man coming in, it’s an all-white audience and all these small little towns that eventually I would go on to wrestle in — but at that time he changed the audience’s behavior and actually had them cheer for this black man.
“And not when he was wrestling against other black men, ’cause he was usually the only black guy in the territory, he was wrestling against other white wrestlers. I thought that was really unique, and I thought that was really powerful, and I thought that it deserved to be said. And that’s what this man did.”
Finally, he expressed his feelings on how a loss like this can bring people closer together.
“What’s amazing to me now, after a day like today after we come here and we give our respect and our love, he’s galvanized, he’s responsible for galvanizing families now," he said. Because through processes like this, we’ve all lost loved ones, but guaranteed when we walk out of these doors, we’re going to hold each other a bit tighter, we’re going to hug each other a bit harder, we’re going to kiss each other and we’re going to say, ‘I love you,’ and we’re going to be a bit more present.”
You can watch the video below, which is complete with an extended caption that touched on similar themes. Check it out:
