The Rock Used to Be America’s Sweetheart. He’s Really Done It This Time.

The Rock—international superstar, national treasure, and proprietor of the world’s most emotive face—is back in WWE. But instead of celebrating the return of one of the sport’s most infamous legends, fans are freaking pissed. Like, they’re literally booing him out of arenas.

This is an unexpected development, because ostensibly, there is no place on earth where the Rock should be more welcome than within the confines of a professional wrestling ring, which is where he first cultivated his one-of-a-kind charisma, way back in the prehistory of America. (Read: the late 1990s.) But to understand the Rock’s recent curdling, you’ll need to get up to speed on a whole lot of wrestling lore, and the fact that he’s not quite as beloved outside the ring as the box office might have you believe. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

Why are people mad at the Rock?

By asking this question you realize you’re cracking open a whole Pandora’s box of hyper-insulated pro wrestling nerdery, right?

What? Nevermind. Let me just close this—

Too late! So, last Friday, on WWE’s television show SmackDown, the Rock made a glorious return to the ring in order to challenge Roman Reigns for the prestigious Undisputed WWE Universal Championship, which is a title that Reigns has held for more than three years. The match is scheduled for this year’s edition of WrestleMania—basically, the WWE’s Super Bowl, where the company takes over a football stadium to showcase the very best of fake fighting.

In a vacuum, this is the exact sort of match that WWE fans fantasize about. The Rock hasn’t really wrestled in over a decade, and Roman has done an excellent job portraying the exact kind of smug, narcissistic villain you desperately want to see taken down a peg. A main event between the two would possess crossover Hollywood pageantry, drippy overtones of “legacy,” and, of course, two giant guys beating the piss out of each other.

What’s so bad about that?

Because, as is clear to anyone who cares even a little bit about pro wrestling, this is most certainly not the story that WWE—who employs a whole fleet of writers tasked with dreaming up the hubrises and motivations of their on-screen characters—was trying to tell. In fact, the Rock’s insurrection torpedoed the last year of creative vision, and made Cody Rhodes, the other guy you need to know about, look like a chump.

Who is Cody Rhodes?

Cody Rhodes is a supremely talented wrestler who tried, and failed, to beat Roman Reigns at last year’s WrestleMania. This was a bit of a swerve. Everyone in the building expected that Cody would win, thus banishing Reigns to the shadow realm once and for all. The script had it all: Cody was returning after a debilitating injury, and, more importantly, WWE’s creative team hammered home the idea that he was competing for the one belt his late father, the legendary Dusty Rhodes, never won during his time as a wrestler.

So yes, the defeat stung, but for the nine months afterward, Cody Rhodes opined about his quest to FINISH HIS STORY. Rhodes was dead set on defeating Roman Reigns in a cathartic rematch in 2024, crystalizing a two-year dramatic arc filled to the brim with failure and perseverance, which is really when professional wrestling is at its best. (In fact, you can purchase a Cody Rhodes T-shirt from the WWE shop brandished with the words, Finish the Story.)

Wow, so the WWE has been pitting Rhodes against Reigns for a while. 

Yeah. All of this culminated in January, at WWE’s Royal Rumble—one of the company’s marquee events, where 30 wrestlers compete for a title shot against the current champion. (Which, in this case, is obviously still Roman Reigns.) Guess what, Cody Rhodes won! He was gonna finish the story! All of his hopes and dreams were in reach!

And then WWE’s writers did something unthinkable. Despite building the tension between Rhodes and Reigns for literal years, it appeared that the company had made the unconscionable decision to write Rhodes out in favor of … you guessed it … the Rock. Cody Rhodes announced that he would face Roman again, but not at WrestleMania—offering a meandering jumble of lines to clarify why he was ceding ground to his much more famous colleague. It completely broke the internal logic of Cody’s character and obliterated the reasons we’ve rooted for him for so long. That’s just bad writing, brother.

I can see how that would be pretty frustrating if you cared about wrestling.

Now you can understand why, when Cody Rhodes appeared on this week’s Raw, the whole arena went deafening with chants of “ROCKY SUCKS!” The hashtag #WeWantCody, meanwhile, was the No. 1 trend in the United States, eclipsing, I don’t know, #TrumpMoscowTrial or whatever else. Do you know how much you need to bungle your script to get wrestling fans to turn on the Rock? Compare that opprobrium to literally any of the other times the Rock has walked into a wrestling arena over the past 20 years. (Here’s a personal favorite moment, from WrestleMania 32, where he ignites his own name with a flamethrower.) It goes to show you that while the Rock is one of the most well-liked people on planet Earth, even he cannot escape the gravity of muddled plot development.

OK but, like, why is this happening? Why is the Rock suddenly infringing on Cody’s plans? 

Now you’re getting into some real off-the-books chicanery that nobody can be totally clear on. But the facts are these: On Jan. 23, the Rock joined the board of directors at TKO—the sports conglomerate that owns both WWE and UFC. This all happened during a huge shake-up at the company. Vince McMahon, longtime chairman of WWE, had been ousted as a series of horrifying sexual assault allegations came to light, which seemed to create something of a leadership vacuum. According to some reports, the Rock used his newfound leverage to lobby his way into a headlining match against Roman Reigns, fairly asserting that a clash against Reigns would be a big-ticket item that could garner a ton of mainstream attention, even if that meant painting over the established narrative scaffolding. (Yes, we’re looking at a scenario where a C-suite level executive is going to be exchanging powerbombs in the middle of the ring.)

That seems kinda snakey?

It wouldn’t be the first time! Here’s where we must acknowledge that the Rock is collecting a bit of a reputation for being a conniving presence behind the scenes in the entertainment business. We are only about a year removed from Black Adam—the Rock’s superhero turn—which coincided with an attempt to snag control of the perpetually dysfunctional DC universe by pitching a multi-arc set of franchise films pitting his character against Henry Cavill’s Superman. (He failed, and the DC property was instead handed over to director James Gunn.) There is also the fact that the Rock and some members of the Fast & Furious franchise spent years on hostile terms with one another—partly rooted in his decision to star in the spinoff film Hobbs & Shaw, which excised the rest of the cast—although, apparently, the Rock and Vin Diesel have since squashed their beef. If the Rock is truly angling for decision-making power in WWE boardrooms, then it does seem like part of a larger pattern of aspirations.

Have they done any damage control?

As a matter of fact they have! Thursday night, at a loosely defined WrestleMania press conference, Cody, the Rock, and Reigns had a second confrontation that retconned the first. Cody is now saying that he does want to face Reigns at WrestleMania, but Reigns said he’d much prefer to wrestle the Rock. An impasse! Drama! Collusion! WWE, sensing the growing displeasure with their latest Hollywood import, is now writing the Rock as a legitimate bad guy, which means that the rain of boos greeting him at least make sense within the fiction. It’s hard to say where we’re going from here. Maybe all three of them will wrestle for the belt at the same time? But at the very least, WWE is trying to clean up their own mess, and by and large, fans seem pretty pleased with the new direction—if only to see the Rock get his ass kicked.

Doesn’t the Rock have movies to star in? Why is he back in WWE in the first place?

It does seem like his film career has slowed down a bit. Last year, the Rock’s sole theatrical project was a cameo in the aforementioned vibeless and shark-jumping Fast X—yes, the 10^th Fast & Furious movie. He has Moana 2 on the horizon this year, which is set to be at least a medium-sized deal, but you do get the sense that Peak Rock—with all the GQ profiles and hypothetical presidential bids—is in the rearview mirror. How do you rehabilitate your brand after a couple of duds? The wrestling ring, baby!

While we’re here, are there other reasons I should hate the Rock that I don’t know about?

His shtick is getting pretty old! If you are a fan of, like, subpar middle school–style burns, laced with the faint whiff of homophobia, then I can’t recommend the Rock enough. The last time he was in WWE, he made a whole thing out of nicknaming John Cena “Fruity Pebbles.” I get that wrestling is not the highest art in the world, but we can do a little better than that. As an actor he has basically stuck to the same blueprint—a jacked, handsome guy who has rarely encountered genuine adversity—and frankly, that has gotten pretty old, too.

I won’t bore you with every gripe people have against him, but suffice it to say there are scores of YouTube compilations, angry Reddit posts, and small-time sports and celebrity blogs that attempt to explain the anti-Rock sentiment. Not America’s favorite big guy after all!

So where does this leave Cody?

Who knows! The funny thing is that the WWE has pivoted before, and they’ll pivot again. Maybe Cody will finish his story at WrestleMania, kicking the ass of Roman and the Rock at the same time, before riding off into the sunset with his legacy secure. Or, perhaps, the Rock will totally emasculate him in front of a jampacked stadium, making everyone even angrier than they are right now. I honestly can’t decide which one I’d rather see.