How a Pa. football coach changed Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s life for the better
The late Jody Cwik saw something in Johnson even before he ever saw the troubled teen play football at Bethlehem Freedom High. The Rock will be forever grateful.
Sometimes in life, a moment happens that is so defining that it actually changes the course of your life. You look back on something and say, “If that thing didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.” — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in an Instagram post in April 2021
Jody Cwik left Fox Chase Cancer Center with a feeding tube and three months to live in the spring of 2006. He had esophageal cancer. He was a longtime Pennsylvania high school football coach and educator, committing his life to teaching the game he loved and impacting kids. Now the end was near.
But Cwik — described by a former player at Bethlehem’s Freedom High as being fueled by 98 octane — wasn’t finished. He returned to Kutztown University, where he played in the 1970s, and became a volunteer coach. Feeding tube be damned.
I had to go to the bathroom. Well, I said, “I’m not going to use the regular student bathroom because it smelled of smoke and it was just disgusting.” This is my first or second week in Freedom High School. I went to use the teachers’ lounge and their bathroom because, well, it’s super clean. I went in there and used the bathroom. In comes one of our teachers, who is also one of our football coaches. His name was Jody Cwik. He was a badass. He goes, “Hey! What are you doing in here?” I said, “I’m using the bathroom.” He said, “You can’t be in here. Get out of here.” I looked at him. Again, I’m 15 and new in the school. I’ve been in trouble. I said, “I’ll leave when I’m done.” I continued to wash my hands. He got so [ticked]. — The Rock
Cwik’s left leg was in a cast from his toe to his hip when he met his future wife, Dianne, at Kutztown in October 1974. He didn’t miss a beat, moving around the Berks County campus on crutches.
“I call him crazy,” said Dianne Cwik, who married Jody in 1978. “Let me explain this to you. He was 5-foot-10, 215 pounds when I met him and he played middle guard. So you figure it out. He was that kind of crazy. He was just so into it.”
Jody Cwik became a teacher in Bethlehem while his wife taught in Reading. He started coaching football at Freedom High in 1980.
Johnson, the son of a once-famous professional wrestler, arrived in the spring of 1988 after moving from Hawaii to Nashville to the Lehigh Valley. He was arrested, suspended, and nearly kicked out of school within weeks of moving to Bethlehem. But Johnson was also 6-foot-4 and 280 pounds. The student body thought he was an undercover cop.
“Everyone in school was talking about him,” said Mike Santella, who played for Cwik at Freedom. “Everyone was trying to figure out what this guy was all about. He looked like he was 25 years old. He had a little cheesy mustache.”
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Johnson loved the weight room but didn’t play sports. The wrestling coach asked Johnson to hit the mats. The track and field coach recruited him. Everyone wanted a piece.
He said, “Get out of here now!” He banged the walls. He had a real temper. I kept it cool, continued to wash my hands, and just looked at him. I dried my hands off. He’s steaming. As I walked by him, I gave him a little brush. He was so [ticked]. I kept walking. Later on that night, I felt really bad about what I had done and felt like it was a really poor representation of who I thought I was. I just wasn’t that kid, even though I had acted like that and gotten into a lot of trouble. I felt really bad. — The Rock
Cwik was fiery, never afraid to rip into a player during practice for missing an assignment. It was how he was raised in Phillipsburg, N.J. But he also had a way of making his players know he cared.
“You could sense that he wanted the best out of you,” said Nikolas Tsamoutalidis, who went on to play at Indiana State after starring for Cwik. “You recognized that because he was very transparent.”
Cwik always saw potential. Santella was a receiver in a Wing-T offense — “If you know anything about football, the Wing-T offense runs the ball like 80 times a game and throws the ball twice,” Santella said — but Cwik gave his seldom-used player the teammate award at the end-of-season banquet.
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A year later, Santella returned to Freedom to catch a game. He was enrolled at East Stroudsburg University but not enjoying school. He missed football. Cwik, seeing the potential in his former player, soon called and asked him to coach Freedom’s freshman squad.
“I said, ‘Heck, yeah,’” said Santella, a longtime college assistant and the current offensive line coach at East Stroudsburg. “Jody Cwik is the reason I’m where I am today. I have no problem saying that he had the biggest effect on my professional career than anybody.”
Cwik, Tsamoutalidis said, taught his players how to conduct themselves, carry themselves, and present themselves. The coach was a “healthy version of a man’s man.” He was a father figure, preparing his players for more than just the next game.
The next day, I went to find him and I went to his classroom. I said, “Hey, can I talk to you?” He was still [ticked]. He came out and said, “What?” I said, “I just want you to know that I’m really sorry for how I acted yesterday. I was a real jerk and I want you to know that I’m sorry. That’s it.” I extended my hand. The door is open, I’m talking to him in the doorway. Other students are watching. He looked at me and he looked at my hand. I kept my hand out. I didn’t move it. He looked at me, looked at my hand, looked at me. He left me hanging. But then he shook my hand. — The Rock
Cwik was intense on the sideline and even wilder in school. His coworkers called him a mini-hurricane. And it wasn’t just because he loved the University of Miami football team.
“He was just nuts in the classroom,” Dianne Cwik said. “He just loved kids. If you saw him around kids, you would know. They just related to him. In the morning, he was the first one outside, greeting everyone. Yelling and screaming. ‘How’s your day? What did you have for dinner?’ They appreciated someone like that.”
Cwik taught in the Bethlehem Area School District for 28 years. He started in alternative education before teaching social studies at Freedom and finishing as a seventh-grade geography teacher. The career started as an excuse for him to be a football coach, but teaching quickly became his passion. Cwik had a challenging childhood and a complicated relationship with his parents. He was drawn to students like him, always seeing the good in them even when times seemed rough.
When he shook my hand, he goes, “Thank you.” He was a real gruff guy. “Thank you.” He was shaking my hand hard. I’ll never forget it. I was like, “I think he’s going to swing on me right now. I think I have one coming. I earned this one.” These words that he said to me completely changed my life. He said, “Hey, I want you to come out and play football for me.” That was the last thing I expected him to say. I thought I was going to get decked. I said, “What?” He said, “I want you to come out and play football for me.” I didn’t even think twice. I said, “OK.” That was it. — The Rock
Johnson played two seasons for Cwik, wreaking havoc on the defensive and offensive lines thanks more to his physique than his technique.
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“I still have the old VHS tapes,” Santella said. “You don’t have to know what number The Rock is to find him. It’s a bunch of small white dudes running around and this huge Samoan. He was strong as a house. He was a piece of clay for the coaching staff to mold.”
Johnson, Tsamoutalidis, and their buddy Joe Gerencser lifted nearly every day at a gym in Allentown. Tsamoutalidis knew Johnson was built for stardom, he just didn’t know what his friend would end up doing. The new kid at Freedom was dripping with charisma and powered by a work ethic that pushed everyone to be better. But that’s not all that set Johnson apart.
“He was never about the in-crowd,” Tsamoutalidis said. “He really befriended the underdogs, the ones who people would see as marginalized. That was pretty awesome to see.”
Tsamoutalidis wonders now what attracted Johnson to kids on the fringe. Maybe it was his time hanging around professional wrestling, as he was comfortable around people who came from difficult places. Or maybe it was because of where Johnson was in his life.
“When they moved to Bethlehem, we didn’t know, but that was probably the toughest time of their lives,” Tsamoutalidis said.
Johnson’s father, Rocky, and Tony Atlas were the first Black men to become champions in the World Wrestling Federation (now called WWE) when they won the company’s tag-team titles. He was a groundbreaking wrestler. But eventually the lights dimmed.
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The Johnsons were evicted from their home in Hawaii after failing to pay the rent and lived in a motel in Nashville before moving north. Rocky Johnson opened a carpet-cleaning business but struggled to find peace when the cheering stopped. He drank heavily and had a strained relationship with his son.
Tsamoutalidis, who also had a complicated relationship with his father, believes that’s why he and Johnson connected so well with Cwik. The coach gave them something they were missing.
Tsamoutalidis is now the Bethlehem Area School District’s administrator of student support and wellness. He focuses on the mental health of students, aiming to “remove as many obstacles as we can for kids to be a healthier version of themselves and to be better students.”
Tsamoutalidis talks regularly to Johnson, pushing him in recent years to be open about mental health and talk about the challenges he overcame on his way to the top. The friends motivate each other like their old coach used to.
“He’s in the limelight, I’m not, and I’m totally cool with that,” said Tsamoutalidis, who is known in school as Mr. T. “He’s creating hope in his way and I’m doing it my way, all because of someone who gave us hope at some point. We need more people dealing hope to other people with no strings attached.
“It all goes full circle to that one interaction that Dwayne had in the bathroom with Coach Cwik. That one interaction when Coach Cwik called me out in practice, pushed my button, and got the best out of me. We don’t understand the power we could have in just one simple interaction to change someone’s mindset and the trajectory for the rest of their lives.”
Tsamoutalidis was with Johnson when his massive friend was charged with shoplifting at the mall. He saw him get into fights. Johnson was unable to control the frustrations from a difficult home life and made rash decisions, like using the bathroom in the teacher’s lounge. Johnson was a good kid, Tsamoutalidis said. He just needed a hand.
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He said, “I think you have potential. I’ve never seen you play. I don’t know if you can play. But you have potential.” The point is that in that moment of someone seeing potential in me when I certainly didn’t see the potential in myself, that changed my life. It set me on a path where it enabled me to be focused on something and focused on a goal. — The Rock
Johnson’s athleticism was enough for college coaches as they flocked to Freedom High. He signed with the University of Miami in 1990 a month after “The U” won a national championship. Johnson kept in touch with Cwik, inviting his old coach every year to a game. But Cwik couldn’t go. He had his own team to lead.
“Dwayne called him in his senior year,” said Santella, who was then assisting Cwik. “They were playing that weekend in Pittsburgh. ‘I checked the schedule, you guys play Friday night. You’re free.’ Me and Jody Cwik coached the game Friday night, got on a plane, flew to Pittsburgh, and watched Dwayne.”
Johnson didn’t play much that day in November 1993 as he was mostly a reserve defensive tackle for the Hurricanes. But the guy who saw potential when no one else did was able to watch Johnson play college ball.
“We waited for him after the game and he gave us a duffel bag of hats and shirts before he got on the bus,” Santella said. “We had a really nice reunion. This was before he was anybody. He always respected Jody.”
Johnson turned a few years later to professional wrestling, following his father’s path. He became one of the biggest stars in wrestling history before starring in Hollywood films and becoming one of the most famous people in the world.
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Cwik died in October 2006. He was 51 years old. His obituary mentioned that he coached Johnson and was not shy about telling people that he knew The Rock before he was The Rock. And now Johnson isn’t shy about saying he may not have become The Rock without his coach.
“I’m so sad that he’s not here,” Dianne Cwik said. “I’m sure he knows, looking down on us. But it would just be so thrilling for him to know that. It’s amazing. It warms my heart.”
The Rock is back again with the WWE and will be in the main event at WrestleMania on Saturday night at Lincoln Financial Field. It’s his first scheduled match in 11 years and he’ll be just 75 miles from where a coach shook his hand and refused to let go.
The bottom line is that guy changed my life because he gave me a second chance and he believed in me. As a punk kid, I had no business getting a second chance. But he saw past that. I think he saw my potential through my apology. I believe in second chances. Him giving me a second chance changed my life. — The Rock