The Rock Shouldn't Have Said... (The Rock Says: The Most Electrifying Man in Sports-Entertainment - The Rock and Joe Laydon)

Member Name: IainWear

Product:	The Rock Says: The Most Electrifying Man in Sports-Entertainment - The Rock and Joe Laydon
Date:	05/12/04 (169 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Available cheaply, He clearly loves his family

Disadvantages: You get what you pay for, Only for the wrestling fan, Showing its age now

Dwayne Johnson. Also known as “The Rock”. At present, he’s one of Hollywood’s up and coming film stars, having taken the lead role in 2004’s “Walking Tall” and having starred in “The Scorpion King” and “The Mummy Returns” in recent years. In 2005 he’s likely to be even bigger, with a support role in “Be Cool” alongside such major names as John Travolta and Uma Thurman.

If this is all you know “The Rock for, this isn’t going to be the book for you. It doesn’t touch on his acting career at all, being written before that ever got started. It’s the story of his life up until late June 1999, when he was not an actor in the traditional sense, but a star of the world of sports-entertainment. A star of professional wrestling.

The Rock is not shy about his short-comings in his younger years. Growing up as the son, and indeed the grandson, of a professional wrestler, he was picked on as a child and frequently got into fights. Having a short fuse, he was often causing trouble as well.

The Rock follows his life from school, to college in Miami and his attempts to become a professional American Football player. He says a lot about his family and about Dany, the woman he met at college who was to become his wife. Strangely, though, he says little about his early days as a wrestler, when things weren’t going so well, skipping straight onto when he was in the WWE and his rapid rise to stardom there.

The Rock had a tough act to follow here. At the time of publication, the only other current WWE star to have had their biography published was Mankind. His “Have a Nice Day” was one of the better biographies I’ve ever read, filled with warmth and anecdotes of his life inside and outside the ring. It was also a much bigger book than The Rock’s, reflecting the vast difference in age and experience between them.

The Rock’s biography makes an interesting contrast to Mankind’s, in that the focus is in a completely different place. Admittedly, all of Mankind’s life was wrestling, and his book reflected that. But The Rock’s career, at the point the book was written, was twenty years shorter than Mankind’s, so there has to be a lot about his life to cater for there being less wrestling to talk about. For the non-wrestling fan, this is likely to make it a lot more interesting. For the wrestling fan who is only reading the book to read about “The Rock” and not about Dwayne Johnson, it’s likely to come as something of a disappointment.

However, about half way through the book, when The Rock starts to make it within the world of sports-entertainment, the focus and the style of writing change completely. It’s almost as if there’s a cut off point where the ghost writer, Joe Layden, steps back and lets The Rock take over. Virtually the whole story from this point onwards is written as a wrestling promo. There’s a distinct cut off where the story of Dwayne Johnson ends and the story of The Rock begins, As The Rock doesn’t, or didn’t at the time, exist anywhere but in the world of sports-entertainment, this means it gets pretty boring and pretty samey very quickly.

If you’re not a wrestling fan, you’ll not be able to follow what’s going on. The character of The Rock is pretty arrogant and always speaks in the third person, which makes it pretty difficult to read and him a difficult person to like. As Dwayne Johnson, his love for his family is obvious, but as The Rock, there is no emotion conveyed at all. If you’re a late 1990s era wrestling fan, you’re likely to know exactly what The Rock is like and love it. Otherwise, the novelty wears off pretty quickly.

The other major problem with “The Rock Says…” is in the pictures. Not the big, glossy colour pictures that seem to decorate the middle of virtually every biographical work, but the black and white pictures that decorate the starts of chapters and are added throughout the text. Some of these are simply handwritten slogans of The Rock’s, which again seems pretty pointless for the non-wrestling fan that may have picked up this book. But many of the actual pictures are greatly stylised, with lumps taken out of them or cut off. This draws the eye away from the main body of the picture to the edges, as well as meaning that parts of the picture are cut off, giving them less impact that they could have done.

Unlike Mankind’s book, which had a wider appeal, this is really one written purely for the wrestling fan. If you’re not into wrestling and you’re not into The Rock, this really isn’t something that will hold your attention for very long. If you’ve come across Dwayne Johnson as an actor and wondered what he did before, this will answer that question, but you may find yourself not actually caring very much by the end.

This is a dreadful shame, as the early parts of the book show Dwayne Johnson as being quite a likeable person, as a man of great honour who loves his family. The Rock, however, is less likeable and the whole point of the book seems to be to present The Rock as a bad guy, which is another wrestling technique and yet another reason why the appeal of this book is so limited.

The one good thing about this book is the price. Because it’s now horribly out of date thanks to being five years old and thanks to the subject having had a complete change of career since it was written, it’s available very cheaply. Copies have been seen for £3.75 at Green Metropolis, which is still too expensive, in my opinion. So check out the Amazon Marketplace, where it can be picked up from 1p, or eBay, where copies have been sold from 5p. Although this may sound like a bargain, you do get what you pay for.

It is possible that The Rock may move on to become a bigger star in the world of film than he was in the world of wrestling. If you become a fan of his there, your best hope is that someone will write another biography of him in about ten years time and that it will focus on Dwayne Johnson the man, rather than “The Rock”, professional wrestler. That may well be worth reading. But this, unless you’re WWE’s biggest fan, simply isn’t.

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