What Dwayne Johnson Knows About Pain

The first really exciting moment of my day with Dwayne Johnson was when he showed me the evolution of his punch. We were talking in a room near his kitchen. Johnson was barefoot, legs stretched out on his couch. He wore black jeans and a black Willie Nelson T-shirt, the sleeves of which were working extremely hard to fit around his biceps. Hawaiian music (Don Ho Radio) played from a Bluetooth speaker. I was telling Johnson, apologetically, that I wasn’t really a pro wrestling fan — that the last wrestler I could remember liking was a guy from the 1990s called Razor Ramon, a sneering villain with wet curly hair who used to throw his toothpick at kids in the crowd.