Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson shared an emotional video on his Instagram Friday in which he’s delivering the eulogy during his late father Rocky Johnson’s funeral.
“I wish I had one more shot just to say goodbye, to say I love you, to say thank you, to say I respect you but I have a feeling he’s watching, he’s listening,” Johnson said in the Instagram video. “I know my dad would be saying Kay Fabe the tears… You know you try and you think about ‘well, what am I gonna write?’ You know, you don’t know what to write for a eulogy, it’s your dad. You don’t expect it. As you guys know he went very quick.”
Johnson’s father, who was a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, died last month at the age of 75.
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Rocky Johnson won multiple regional National Wrestling Alliance titles, but his greatest success came from his work as a tag-team specialist with famed Samoan wrestler “High Chief” Peter Maivia. Rocky retired from wrestling in 1991 and trained Dwayne despite initial misgivings. Upon his WWF debut in 1996, Dwayne Johnson took the ring name Rocky Maivia in honor of his wrestling roots before reimagining himself as the Attitude Era heel known as The Rock.
Johnson continued his eulogy, explaining how the news of his father’s death was told to him as he was pulling into work on the first day of production of Netflix’s “Red Notice” with Ryan Reynolds and Gal Gadot.
“It all got really foggy and it seemed like it was a big dream… You know how you have those moments where you try to shake yourself out of it, and you’re like ‘No, it’s not a dream, uh, my dad’s gone,’” Johnson continued. “And in that moment I just thought ‘What do I need to do? What’s the next thing that I need to do?’ And I heard a voice say ‘Well, hey the show must go on,’ and that was my dad that was my old man who told me that.”
Johnson went on to remember his father as a trailblazer.
“The phrase of trailblazer is connected to my dad’s name it means when you do things that have never been done,” he said. “When somebody is a trailblazer that means that they actually, they have the ability to change behavior and audience’s behavior, people’s behavior.
“For my dad, when he broke into the business in the mid ’60s and throughout the late ’60s and into the ’70s in the United States where racial tension and divide was very strong and in the ’60s and the ’70s you have a black man coming in, it’s an all-white audience and all these small little towns that eventually I would go on to wrestle in — but at that time he changed the audience’s behavior and actually had them cheer for this black man.”