You know who has had a bad few weeks? The Rock. The popular actor, wrestler and entrepreneur has been the subject of several recent negative articles and plenty of social media chatter about his alleged behavior while filming, as well as his alleged ego. If the stories are to be believed, he routinely shows up hours late to set, pees in water bottles without going to his trailer and has an inflated sense of his own importance. Oh, and also, he lies about his height, which is now being cited as evidence by some that all the other allegations must be true.
Well, I can’t speak to where he pees or what time he shows up, but as a hardcore wrestling fan, I can speak to the height situation and confirm that is not his fault. WWE typically bills him as being 6’5”, but there have certainly been plenty of reports that he’s likely a few inches shorter. He admitted in a Q&A that he’s actually 6’4″, though some claim he’s more like 6’2″. Maybe, but if he is, that’s not really on him. Almost everyone in the history of the wrestling business claims to be a height a few inches taller. You wanna know a terrible, deep dark secret? Andre The Giant was not 7’4”. He was absolutely gigantic but almost certainly more like 7’ gigantic, as you can see in this picture with Wilt Chamberlain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those extra four inches were just part of making his character seem larger than life.
If you start Googling any professional wrestler and look hard enough, you’ll almost certainly find a listed height they wrestled under and an actual height they were in real life. WWE bills The Undertaker’s brother Kane as being 7’ tall. He’s so massive he even steps over the top ropes when he’s entering the ring, but one time he took a picture with 7’1” Shaq and well, he’s a lot more than an inch shorter. And you could just keep going down the list. It’s so ingrained in the industry and has been for so long that even if you wanted to go by your real height, WWE and the other promotions probably wouldn’t let you because it would only expose everyone else.
Now, to be clear, as a wrestling fan, I’m not bothered by this. The whole point is to present a show filled with larger than life characters. It’s why some performers are billed as hailing from “Parts Unknown.” I’m sure they’re getting paid. I’m sure there’s an address listed on their tax forms, but for the purposes of the show, acts like the classic 1980s tag team Demolition are billed as being from “Parts Unknown,” which helps add to the aura of mystery surrounding them.
I’m not here to tell you not to criticize The Rock or that all the charges against him about his behavior are wrong, but I am here to tell you that lying about his height should not be taken as a sign of egomania, specifically because he’s a professional wrestler. Performers have been lying about it for as long as professional wrestler has existed, and they’ll continue to lie about it for as long as it exists in the future.
As for The Rock, he’s currently back in Hollywood shooting his new movie The Smashing Machine. He finished up his recent very successful WWE run after WrestleMania and is widely expected to return to the squared circle later this year. When he does, it’ll be to great fanfare and huge crowd reactions, no matter what his height is announced as.