The first really exciting moment of my day with Dwayne Johnson was when he showed me the evolution of his punch. We were talking in a room near his kitchen. Johnson was barefoot, legs stretched out on his couch. He wore black jeans and a black Willie Nelson T-shirt, the sleeves of which were working extremely hard to fit around his biceps. Hawaiian music (Don Ho Radio) played from a Bluetooth speaker. I was telling Johnson, apologetically, that I wasn’t really a pro wrestling fan — that the last wrestler I could remember liking was a guy from the 1990s called Razor Ramon, a sneering villain with wet curly hair who used to throw his toothpick at kids in the crowd.
“I liked that guy too,” Johnson said — and this sent a little scrap of research rattling loose in my mind and tumbling out of my mouth: I had read somewhere that Johnson, early in his career, studied and copied Razor Ramon’s punch.
“Wow!” Johnson said.
This factoid made him happy, and so he unleashed his famous smile, the shining white charisma-bomb that sometimes seems like the whole reason movie screens were invented, and also the reason GIFs were invented, and also (I can say now, having seen it in person) the reason smiling in person was invented. It is a smile that makes you feel as if the sun is setting over an undiscovered tropical beach on which 10,000 baby sea turtles are about to hatch.
“Wow!” he said again.
And, smiling that smile, Johnson told me the story of his punch. Back in the infancy of his wrestling career, before he was this multimedia phenomenon known as the Rock — before he could whip up whole arenas by raising a single eyebrow, before he hosted “Saturday Night Live” five times, before he got the word “smackdown” added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary or became People Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” or found himself seriously courted by political parties to run for president — all the way back in 1996, Johnson was still a newbie performing under the name Flex Kavana. (Do not ask.) One day, he got the opportunity of his dreams: a tryout match for the what was then the World Wrestling Federation. It went fairly well, and backstage, afterward, everyone was congratulating him.
Then Pat Patterson shuffled over. Patterson was a salty old wrestling veteran, a power player in the industry. Gravelly voice. Big slab of a face. Cigarette in one hand.
“Good job,” he said.
“Thank you,” Johnson said.
“Your punches,” Patterson said — and the statement just hung there, unexplained, in a cloud of smoke.
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