If you know anything about Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson personal life and career, you should know he has tried his hand at a lot of different things. In college, he was a football player for the University of Miami who hoped to go pro. When he ended up mostly playing backup, he shifted his dreams to wrestling and became the catchphrase machine WWE fans know and love. Of course, most of the world knows him now as a big budget box office machine, but even he upended those expectations by taking on the more critically-acclaimed Smashing Machine this year. He’s a man with many goals, so why didn’t he ever try to fight in other spectrums?
If you’ve ever wondered why The Rock never tried to swap from WWE to UFC or even MMA, we finally have an answer. Travis and Jason Kelce asked him about this during an episode of the “New Heights” podcast, and he candidly informed the two NFL players that MMA is “a whole different beast” or “monster.”
Travis Kelce specifically asked him if he’d ever thought about it regardless, and he answered:
As you’re training in MMA Camp, it’s like, ‘OK, you know how ego will start knocking at your door? And be like, ‘Hey… I could be a bad motherfucker doing this thing.’ In the mid to late nineties, we weren’t making a lot of money, ‘cause we were opening match in [WWE]. So there was a time when me and my buddies started like, ‘We might be able to do well. Those guys are making a lot of money.’
These days the WWE is competitive with UFC in terms of yearly revenue, but back in the '90s, Dwayne Johnson was not yet "The Rock" we know and love today. (He really peaked around '99 or '00.) In comparison, UFC was a place where you could really bring in some bucks, and it sounds like the money was tempting to think about. The wrestler-turned-actor used to think the grass might have been greener on the other side, and he said he did consider what life in another fighting realm might be like.
There was crossover between fighting styles, too, making the possibility a serious option if he'd wanted to pursue it. Ultimately, however, there was one thing holding him back:
And then you realize, ‘No, wait, those guys would take my jaw and knock it into another area code.’ Man, I’m not doing that. I don’t like to get hit in the face.
Though it didn't happen, I do enjoy thinking of this alternate reality where Dwayne Johnson made a name for himself as a serious fighter alongside names like Randy Couture, Dan Severn or Ken Shamrock, many of whom did multiple runs in multiple sports. Maybe somewhere in the multiverse the Brahma Bull got his wish, but in this life he's now a partner in TKO Group Holdings and is once again taking a more active role in WWE.
Oh yeah, and that's just a side gig to his a-list acting career, which has produced some great roles for The Rock in recent years. He's said he's looking for more "opportunities" to stretch himself, but it sounds like that probably won't mean UFC! Still, it sounds like it all worked out exactly as it was seemingly meant to.
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