Bret Hart Names Which WWE Legends Used to Bully The Rock Backstage

The idea that anyone could bully Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson nowadays seems like lunacy. But back when he was rising up the ranks in the WWF, “The People’s Champ” was apparently a backstage target for some of the company’s biggest names, including Shawn Michaels and Triple H. Bret Hart recapped some of the incidents he saw in a new installment of Confessions of The Hitman. Hart presumed that guys like HBK and “The Game” were so hard on him because they wanted him to break and quit the business.

“A lot of the wrestlers would give him a hard time in those days, a really hard time, enough to try to break him and get him to quit and they almost succeeded,” Hart said (h/t Wrestling Inc.). “And I can remember going to bat for Dwayne quite a few times and kind of looking out for him, Owen too. I think Owen and I had a lot to do with sort of looking out for him when he first came down. [The Rock] was kind of a marked guy.”

He recalled one time when Michaels chewed him out after he hit a dropkick from the top rope.

“I remember Shawn Michaels coming into the dressing room and dressing down poor Dwayne,” Hart recalled. “Shawn came in and just dressed him down and he chewed him out. And I believe, [HBK] told [The Rock] to never do a top rope dropkick ever again because that was his move. That’s what he was mad about. And then, he slammed the door and he walked out. The Rock was [deflated] because in those days, Shawn had a lot of weight. He was a pretty important guy for the company, a veteran guy kind of dressing him down like that, he was apologizing and said he didn’t know, and he thought it would be okay.

“I remember the door closed after Shawn left and I said, ‘that’s bulls–t. That’s total bulls–t.’ I said, ‘nobody owns the dropkick off the top. You can do that. Owen does it all the time! Why doesn’t he cut a promo on Owen?’ I said, ‘they’re just busting your chops and they’re trying to work on you.’”

Hart said the bullying continued until roughly a year after the Montreal Screwjob, and chalked it up to jealousy.

“Just jealousy and out of nowhere,” Hart said. “Just jealousy, and distinctly jealousy. Seeing someone that is a nice kid climbing the ladder bothered someone like Shawn Michaels or bothered Triple H so much that they couldn’t see passed it. They worked on him and worked on him and it was pretty clear to me. And it wasn’t the only time they came in and made those types of scenes. They did that a few times, but I had a lot of clout at that time too, so I could go in and make him rebound and say, ‘don’t pay attention to that stuff, you didn’t do anything wrong’ because he was still green. That’s a term we use in [pro] wrestling. He was still a rookie.”

Johnson went on to have classic feuds with “The Game” as he became one of the company’s biggest stars of all time. He finished his WWE career as a 10-time world champion.