Friday Night SmackDown‘s move from the USA Network to the FOX Network will officially take place this Friday, and the WWE is pulling out all of the stops to make the premiere a must-see event. Three matches have already been booked for the show — Kofi Kingston vs. Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship, Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair vs. Sasha Banks and Bayley and Kevin Owens vs. Shane McMahon in a Ladder match — and it will serve as the Blue Brand’s 20th Anniversary special. More than a dozen legends have been booked to appear, including Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Goldberg, Sting, Mick Foley, Trish Stratus, Lita, Mark Henry, Booker T and Kurt Angle.
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You can now add one more name to that list — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The Hollywood A-Lister and eight-time WWE Champion officially confirmed his appearance on Monday afternoon via his Twitter account.
FINALLY…I come back home to my @WWE universe.
— Dwayne Johnson (@TheRock) September 30, 2019
This FRIDAY NIGHT, I’ll return for our debut of SMACKDOWN!
LIVE on @FOXTV.
There’s no greater title than #thepeopleschamp.
And there’s no place like home.
Tequila on me after the show 😈🥃#IfYaSmell🎤 #Smackdown#RocksShow #FOX pic.twitter.com/V5i4cxqIqH
“The People’s Champ” has been synonymous with the Blue Brand since the beginning, given that the show’s name is based off of one of his catchphrases. He wrestled in the main event of the show’s premiere back on April 29, 1999, in which he teamed up with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin to defeat The Undertaker and Triple H (alongside other members of the Corporate Ministry). His final televised match on SmackDown came in August 2002 when he won a tag team match alongside Edge against Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero. Five days later he would drop the WWE Championship to Lesnar at SummerSlam.
Johnson admitted in an interview on Live With Kelly and Ryan in early August that he had “quietly retired” as an in-ring competitor. His last match (minus the eight-second impromptu win over Erick Rowan at WrestleMania 32) took place at WrestleMania 29, where he tore two muscles in his loss against John Cena.
“I miss wrestling, I love wrestling. Yes, I do,” he said. “I quietly retired from wrestling because I was lucky enough to have just a really wonderful career and accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, but there’s nothing like a live crowd, a live audience, a live microphone as you both know. Plus, I grew up in wrestling. For a lot of you guys that don’t know, my grandfather wrestled, my dad as well, my whole family. And I actually had my very first match ever in the WWE, was in Madison Square Garden and it was a big pay-per-view, and it was funny because I credit my time and my journey in pro wrestling to getting me to where I am at today.
