“Do you know how to work the pole?” he asks as he hands it over, grinning.
Johnson likes the calmness of fishing. He likes the strategy. And, he says, it reminds him of his father. “It was a thing that I was able to do with my old man—one of the things that we would do to spend time together, which wasn’t a lot of stuff. But fishing was one of them.”
It was a rare constant as the family crisscrossed the country to follow Rocky’s wrestling engagements, which would typically last for just a year. “We’d always carry fishing poles in the trunk. And as we’re rolling along the highway, if we saw a body of water somewhere, he’d be like, ‘Hey, let’s stop and fish.’ ”
It’s around this time that I cast my lure not into the water but onto the grassy bank next to the water, and Johnson gently steps in with a few pointers.
“Let it go sooner,” he says. I do. It works.
“There you go!” he says, like a proud dad—Johnson has three daughters—and I ask him if his father was the same way.
“It was tough love with him,” Johnson says. “Very little patience with shit. And he came up in an era where he had to fight for everything. Black pro wrestler at that time in the ’60s and ’70s, mainly throughout the South. So, you know, you can imagine not only in the South but then pro wrestling. And at that time, that crowd, that pro wrestling crowd was not what it is today. Today it’s very diverse. Back then, pro wrestling was super white. Um, so, very little patience—nice cast. There we go.”
“Very little patience,” I remind Johnson.
“Very little patience. Raised me with a tough hand and physical. Didn’t beat my ass or anything like that, but just our bonding was—at a very young age—you could come to the gym with me at five and six years old, but you just gotta sit. So I sat in the gym and just watched him and his wrestler workout buddies work out.” This would happen in towns all across the country, Johnson says. “And then, at six, seven, eight, what he would do then after he was done working out, he would take me on the wrestling mats at the gym. Because usually he was at a YMCA or a Boys Club or something like that. He’d beat my ass that way, in terms of teaching me wrestling basics and things like that.”
Johnson attributes his life as an actor and a wrestler to the things he was around as a kid, watching his dad work. “But also I think just growing up in the way that I did and having to grow up very fast,” he says. “By the time I hit 13, 14, 15, a lot of shit went down in my life.”
