Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson recently opened up about his regrets surrounding his late father, wrestling Hall of Famer Rocky “Soul Man” Johnson, who died at age 75 in 2020.
The actor, who made his return to the World Wrestling Entertainment ring last month, shared a touching tribute to his father on Instagram on Friday, writing that he was “delivering flowers to heaven to my old man.”
“My regret in this life is that I never had a chance to say goodbye to him, because he died suddenly,” he wrote in the caption of the post. “I regret not reconciling our complicated father/son s**t before I lost him. Raised me with tough fatherly love and an even tougher hand. The more I live life, the more grateful I am for it.”
Johnson’s post featured an old video clip of his father in the wrestling ring, with a little Rock seated in the audience, watching.
Rocky “Soul Man” Johnson and fellow wrestler Tony Atlas became the first Black World Tag Team champions in 1983, back when the WWE was called the World Wrestling Federation.
In his tribute on Instagram, Dwayne Johnson, who made his own debut in the wrestling ring in the 1990s, celebrated his dad as a trailblazer.
“He came up the hard way, and trail-blazed for all of us men of color — in any sport & level of entertainment,” he wrote. “But it was also very important to him to pave the way for all men, any color – it didn’t matter.”
In 2020, the “Jumanji” actor shared a video on Instagram of the eulogy he delivered at his father’s funeral. He said his father broke into pro-wrestling in the mid-1960s and into the ’70s, when the country’s “racial tension and divide was very strong.”
The Instagram post also featured a letter he dedicated to his father, in which he wrote that the late wrestling Hall of Famer was “taken too fast.”
“Slipped right thru my hands,” he wrote, adding, “I’ll see you down the road, Soulman.”
