In honor of #ThrowbackThursday, The Rock shared a pretty entertaining story about the first time he appeared on WWE television when he was 11. He also recalls meeting Vince McMahon for the very first time.
You can read the story via The Rock’s Instagram page below.
“My nightmare aka my very first TV “appearance” when I was 11yrs old. At a WWE TV taping in Allentown, PA. Since my dad was always on the road wrestling, any father/son time we got in was great, so I was super pumped to travel with him. It was backstage that I’d meet a man who years later we’d enjoy tremendous success together and he’d become one of my strongest mentors in business – Vince McMahon. I’ll never forget he shook my hand, looked down at me and said “We gotta get you on camera tonight young man!”. I thought, “WHOA I’m gonna be on TV… can’t wait to tell my friends… AWESOME!”. So I’m sitting there in the crowd, the camera man comes over and tells me he’s getting ready to shoot so be ready.. It was in that defining moment that I just realized something awful… I was just getting over a bad case of Chicken Pox (you can clearly see a few “post pox” on my face) and I thought “Holy sh*t this is terrible! The world will see me for the first time and I look like someone set fire to my face and stomped it out with cleats”. Looking back at this gem of a picture, there’s two things I’ve learned: Things are never as bad as they seem (especially at 11yrs old) and instead of worrying about my Chicken Pox I should’ve been concerned with the world questioning whether I was a boy or a girl. Which, for the record happened all the time to me when I was a kid.”
