Think you’ve got the confidence, and the balls, to share embarrassing photos from your youth to millions (AND MILLIONS) of people? You don’t, but, a guy like The Rock certainly has the nuts.
The guy is not only incredibly inspirational but he’s able to laugh at himself and let everyone else in on the joke.
The Rock shared a screengrab from his first TV appearance, at the age of 11, and a hilarious story about meeting Vince McMahon for the first time and how every thought he was a chick back in his youth.
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.
Here’s the Instagram post below of The Rock when he was just a young gir…boy.