Vince McMahon Wanted The Rock To Wrestle A Bear

Vince McMahon once tried to get Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson to wrestle a bear. 

That's the story, according to Bruce Prichard, who discussed the proposed match/publicity stunt on a recent episode of the Something to Wrestle With podcast. 

Prichard was talking about WWE joining the New York Stock Exchange in 2000 and how the company put a ring in the middle of Wall Street to host matches and cut promos for the occasion. 

It was the WWE Chairman's wish to have the People's Champion take on an actual bear as part of the proceedings, as a visual representation of 'bull versus bear' markets (since The Rock was also nicknamed The Brahma Bull).

Wrestling bears were a fairly common attraction in some wrestling organisations (such as Stu Hart's Stampede territory) in decades past, but that was no longer the case by 2000. 

In any event, the bear plan didn't quite work out, as Prichard noted: 

"The bear, thank God, was reconsidered on several fronts. Because, first of all, you had the animal rights activists that would probably not look kindly on a wrestling bear. Even though the human rights activists are the ones that probably should have been alarmed. Because trust me, the bear always goes over. So anyway, as we're getting closer to this, the idea becomes, 'Well, do you really want a bear hanging around on the New York Stock Exchange the day that your stock goes public?'. Well, 'The bear was out today on the New York Stock Exchange'. No, you don't want that. You want 'The Brahma Bull'. You know, it's a bullish market and not a bear market, for God's sakes. So we had 'The Brahma Bull' and we didn't have any bears hanging around there. So it was interesting, but we were able to get it done".

H/T Fightful