The rise of The Rock: How the legendary wrestler turned Hollywood star went from fighting for $40 to a net worth of $800million… and now serves on the WWE’s board of directors

This week it was announced that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson will join the board of TKO Group Holdings – the parent company of WWE and UFC.

A filing with regulators revealed that the world-famous wrestler and movie star will earn as much as $30 million in the position.

But Johnson, now 51, started his career far away from the C-Suite, telling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2018 that he wrestled for just $40 a match… in a parking lot no less.

“Oh, it was hardcore,” he recalled. “So when I first started…I had a $40 guarantee per game every night. … I lived in the Waffle House. I ate there three times a day. So Monday evening was the flea market. I wrestled there at the big flea market in Memphis, Tennessee. Saturday would be the state fair, every Saturday. And then we struggled all week at used car dealers.”

So how did ‘The Rock’ rise from the doldrums of the wrestling world to become one of the most powerful executives?

His in-ring story began under a slightly different name, when Johnson initially fought as Rocky Maivia – a combination of the names of his father (Rocky Johnson) and grandfather (Peter Maivia), both of whom were also wrestlers.

Maivia made his WWF debut in 1996 as a clean cut figure, with the organization keen to highlight his Samoan heritage.

And although he claimed the Intercontinental Championship a year later, he wasn’t an immediate hit with wrestling fans with his babyface persona.

Things started to change a bit in the summer of 1997, when he began adopting the nickname “The Rock” as he began to develop the brash, loud identity he was known for, and joined the Nation of Domination .

He even referred to himself as “The Rock” in the third person.

Feuds with ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and Triple H would increase his fame, as would the infamous slogans he coolly shouted at his opponents. ‘It does not matter!’ he would tell them repeatedly. “Can you smell what ‘The Rock’ is cooking?” was also one of his favorite choruses.

By the late 1990s, ‘The Rock’ had emerged as a full-fledged superstar, and his enormous list of late-career accomplishments – eight WWE Championships and headlining WrestleMania – showed just how highly regarded he ultimately became by the organization.

But after more than seven years of professional wrestling — which followed a brief career as a college and professional football player — Johnson decided to leave the sport in 2004 at just 32 years old (he performed as part of the sport from 2011 to 2013). executor’s time).

“I quietly retired from wrestling because I was fortunate enough to have a really great career and achieve what I wanted to achieve,” he told Live With Kelly & Ryan in 2019.

But ‘The Rock’ had no intention of leaving the public eye. On the contrary: he left wrestling to become a full-fledged movie star, or at least tried to.

The seeds for that route were sown before he was even ready in the ring, when he hosted Saturday Night Love in 2000 and landed his first TV role in 1999, playing his father in an episode of ‘That ’70s Show’ in which wrestling was central. .

But it was in 2001 that ‘The Rock’ landed his first film role in ‘The Mummy Returns’ before earning a starring role in ‘The Scorpion King’ the following year.

And just like his wrestling journey, it didn’t take long for Johnson to fully enter the mainstream.

In 2006 – two years after he retired from wrestling – he earned acclaim for playing Sean Porter in “Gridiron Gang,” a youth football coach who tries to guide a group of juvenile delinquents away from a life of crime.

“With Gridiron Gang, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson has proven that he is capable of making the leap from eyebrow-raising wrestler turned actor to true leading man,” Empire wrote at the time.

He gained further fame through ‘The Other Guys’ (2010) and several roles in the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise, while appearances in family-friendly bubblegum films like ‘Tooth Fairy’ (2009) and ‘Jumanji’ (2017) helped cement his position as a understanding with enormous reach and deep pockets.

Johnson is now worth an estimated $800 million, having gone from a high-flying wrestler to a businessman with a variety of different income streams.

He is believed to have a 30 to 40 percent stake in spirits brand Teremana Tequila. according to Yahoo! Financeswhile also founding his own production studio, Seven Bucks Productions.

He also has an athletic apparel label at Under Armour, Project Rock, which signed a deal with UFC in 2022 to become the company’s official footwear partner.

But The Rock doesn’t just work with leagues; he bought them too.

In 2020, he and a group of investors donated more than $15 million to buy the XFL, a football alternative to the NFL that closed earlier that year due to the pandemic.

The league merged with the USFL late last year and renamed itself the ‘United Football League’.

Making that organization viable will be a huge challenge, but regardless, the fact that Johnson is now running a football league is a sign of how far he has come.

He is a global movie star, best-selling author and WWE legend turned executive who will now help lead the company through an extremely tumultuous time.

“Very few people on the planet understand the convergence of sports, entertainment, media and business like rock,” TKO executive chairman Vince McMahon said in a statement announcing Johnson’s new role on the board.

Roughly three decades after The Rock’s very humble beginnings in the wrestling world, McMahon couldn’t be more right.