The American appetite for football is effectively infinite—over 300,000 fans just turned out for the draft.
This is the bet that cross-category megastar Dwayne Johnson—also known as The Rock—made alongside his long-time business partner Dany Garcia when they acquired the bankrupt XFL in 2020. Even though spring pro football leagues like the AAF (and Vince McMahon’s initial iteration of the XFL) have failed, the Rock’s value proposition is exactly what you’d expect: he’s going to take the lessons he’s learned from pro wrestling, a massively successful film career as well as his own failed pro football career and funnel it all into a new, fan-forward football league. Alongside Garcia, who has deftly managed the visibility of the growing league, it would appear that they have a fighting chance at making their XFL stick in the wide-open sports landscape. Do you smell what the Rock is…building?!”
In advance of Saturday night’s XFL Championship Game, where the underdog Arlington Renegades stunned the heavily favored DC Defenders, I spoke with Johnson and Garcia about cultivating a fan atmosphere from scratch, their biggest surprises from year one of their XFL stewardship—and, yup, beer snake.
GQ: You both have a long history of successful projects as partners. You have to have seen it all. What was the most surprising thing about your first full season as XFL owners?
Dwyane Johnson: Chairwoman?
Dany Garcia: You go first, please.
DJ: With this kind of thing, you never know how it’s going to work out. So that opening weekend—when we bounced around from city to city, state to state—from the moment we went to that first game, my hope was that the fans were gonna come with energy, that they were excited.
But at the same time, the reality was that this was all new to the fans. These players are new. They’re not big stars. The fans don’t know who they are. This version of the league is new, the teams are new, the colors are new, everything is brand new. You’re coming a week after the Super Bowl. Is there football fatigue? Historically, spring football hasn’t worked out over the years. So I wasn’t sure what we were gonna walk into.
And brother, from that first game…I was at the first game, and I remember sitting on the sidelines going, “Holy shit, this feels like there are 100,000 people here.” And then we ended up in DC for our final opening weekend game on Sunday night, and that place was fucking rocking! Excuse my language. But then that beer snake was going on and I didn’t know what the beer snake was. I quickly found out though.
Chairwoman?
DG: My greatest joy has been seeing, right from the beginning, the dynamic play.
In January, we watched these teams that had been practicing in camp for six weeks. And when I saw what they were executing, I was like, It’s there. It was right there. And I could see it.
You can look at our stats. We had a 63% completion rate on our passes. Many of our games were decided by less than four points in the end. Our overtime was amazing. To see that come to life, the excitement, the way things the fans were responding…
Corban Goble
Source link