Emily Clute 
Young Rock season 2 portrays Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s first WWE match—but how did it really happen? Now one of the most famous names in Hollywood, Johnson got his start with WWE (known then as the World Wrestling Federation) in the 90s. Born into a family tree of wrestlers, Johnson would go on to carry his own legacy in the world of wrestling, winning a slew of championships and becoming one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time. For all of that to be possible, however, The Rock had to have his first match.
Young Rock season 2 episode 8, “Corpus Christi,” reflects back on Johnson’s first-ever match with the WWF. Though The Rock portrayed in “Corpus Christi” had a long way to go before he would become the WWE star that he is now known as, the episode follows the icon as he takes his first steps in his wrestling career. His official debut may have happened at the company’s annual Survivor Series pay-per-view in November 1996, but his first match for the WWF was actually a dark match—an unaired match for the crowd before the main card begins—against the Brooklyn Brawler (aka Steve Lombardi) in Corpus Christi, Texas, months before.
Young Rock did a solid job representing Dwayne’s first match. Dwayne did indeed wear a mostly-borrowed set of wrestling gear, including a set of trunks from his uncle, King Haku, the old wrestling boots of Dwayne’s father, WWF wrestler Rocky Johnson, and volleyball kneepads, the only addition he could afford. It was Johnson’s first time wrestling in front of people, as well as his first real wrestling match, and as was portrayed in Young Rock, Johnson won the match against the Brooklyn Brawler in front of 15,000 fans. Johnson was even heckled straight out of the gate in his real-life premiere, with profanity screamed in his direction by a drunk fan. Young Rock is produced in conjecture with Dwayne Johnson, as well as starring the wrestler himself, so it’s no surprise that the show does a decent job with the facts.
While television naturally dramatizes true events, Young Rock sticks closely to the true story of Johnson’s WWF debut, however, there were some minor details in the episode that aren’t quite right. The inclusion of WWE’s Mantaur in the locker room, while humorous, wasn’t accurate. By the time Johnson joined the fray, the Mantaur gimmick had been dropped. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin had also dropped the Ringmaster gimmick by that point. While the lockerroom scene was a clever way to highlight the bizarreness of that period of WWF history, much of the scene’s details were anachronistic. When it comes to the important details of the fight, however, Young Rock gets it right.
That six-minute bout would be one fight that Johnson never forgot. In an Instagram post on the match’s 25th anniversary, Johnson wrote that he made sure that he lost his very last match as a way of giving back to the sport as Steve Lombardi had done for him at the origin of his wrestling career; “May sound strange, but that’s how you give back to the wrestling business when you leave it. You lose. And you move on down the road.” While Young Rock may not have been a perfect portrayal of The Rock’s first match, it pays homage to one of the most important matches in Dwayne Johnson’s career with mostly accurate detail.
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