Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson recently hosted a Los Angeles Lakers Genius Talks Q&A session, during which he spoke about a number of pro wrestling stories from his past to explain how they could translate to the game of basketball. Featured below are some of the highlights.
On his WrestleMania 29 match against John Cena being scheduled for 45 minutes but him suffering an injury at 15 minutes in: “At the 15 minute mark, ‘bang!’ I feel something pop and I’m like ‘What the f*ck?’ I’m laying there and both of us are out. I said ‘Oh f*ck, something is going on.’ 85,000 people and I sort of roll over and stick my hand down in my trunks because I wanted to make sure no bone was sticking out. In the world of wrestling, when you have a big show like this, a big main event that the entire show is based around. The wrestlers will come up to the two people in the main event, at some point, all throughout the night in the locker room and be like, ‘Hey, thank you for the house.’ What that means is thank you drawing – helping draw 85,000 people – and putting a lot of f*cking money in my paycheck. We got a lot of ‘Thank you for the houses’ that night.
“Final move of the match, it’s his big finishing move and I remember, I’m getting up and I’m turning and he’s going to hit me with his big finisher. It’s like a massive suplex where I go over his head and he slams me down. … I feel ‘boom!’ and I don’t know what just happened. Luckily the match is over, one-two-three. Get to the back, can’t move, now I’m getting a little nervous. Doctors come in, John comes in, ‘You okay?’ We like to celebrate with some booze, he brings moonshine, like legit moonshine. It’s some crazy white boy s— that they bring in a jar.”
On “Stone Cold” Steve Austin pushing him every time they worked together: “I think the matches I had with Steve Austin, they were really good. We just had a real special chemistry and any time we got in the ring it kind of created this magic and we broke a lot of records and PPV records. At that time WWE were still in a PPV model – they’re not now – but that was always cool because Steve and I had a goal, which was let’s sell out a stadium and let’s break a PPV record. … He would push me and we would push each other every single night.”
Check out more from The Rock’s L.A. Lakers Q&A above, or at YouTube.com.
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