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Rocky 'Soul Man' Johnson won several championships in a long career, the success a reflection of his physical prowess, as well as his box-office appeal.The Associated Press

Rocky Johnson vanquished nefarious villains to become one of the first black stars of professional wrestling.

The Canadian-born grappler, who was nicknamed Soul Man, endured the dangers and indignities of Jim Crow in the Deep South, where he had to fight racial segregation, as well as scofflaw wrestlers armed with such foreign objects as folding metal chairs.

Mr. Johnson, who has died at 75, sparred as a fledgling boxer with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman; lost but survived a wrestling bout against a 700-pound bear named Terrible Ted; and, had a ringside seat the night in Miami when the comedian Jackie Gleason socked a wrestler in the jaw with a punch that was supposed to miss.

A dashing, charismatic fighter, Mr. Johnson was a popular baby face in the sports entertainment business. He wore close-cropped hair, a lady-killer’s pencil mustache and had facing doves in flight tattooed on his muscled breasts. Fans cheered him as he dispatched such rogues as Adrian Adonis, Greg (The Hammer) Valentine and Killer Karl Kox, who battled in a vest bearing the initials KKK.

Mr. Johnson could spring to his feet from a supine position, displaying a surprising agility for one with a 6-foot-2, 250-pound frame of Herculean musculature.

His signature move was a flying drop kick in which both feet simultaneously struck an opponent in the chest or jaw. The wrestler launched his body feet first at an opponent and, for a moment, flew parallel above the canvas. The unlucky recipient would more often than not also wind up parallel to the canvas.

He won several championships in a long career, the success a reflection of his physical prowess, as well as his box-office appeal. Though he was refused service by restaurants and hotels, he was credited as the first African-American heavyweight pro wrestling champion in Texas, Georgia and Florida, three states of the Confederacy.

One of his greatest triumphs came in 1983 when he and bodybuilder Tony (Mr. USA) Atlas defeated the Wild Samoans to claim the World Tag Team championship in a World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) promotion. The duo, billed as the Soul Patrol, were the first black pair to win the title.

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When Mr. Johnson was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2008, seen here, he was introduced by his son, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, whose fame as a wrestler and a star of Hollywood action and comedy movies far eclipsed his own.WWE, Inc. via AP

“We changed wrestling by paving a new path,” Mr. Atlas posted on Twitter on news of his old teammate’s death, “knocking down doors while showing what movin’ ’n’ groovin’ is all about.”

When Mr. Johnson was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2008, he was introduced by a son whose fame as a wrestler and a star of Hollywood action and comedy movies far eclipsed his own.

“At a time of racial disparity, he was able to cross all lines and become one of the most dynamic and formidable performers of his time,” Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson told the audience at the induction ceremony in Orlando, Fla.

When he first stepped into the square ring in Canada in the 1960s, Rocky Johnson was billed as a “coloured sensation” and “colourful speedster” before promoters settled on calling him the Coloured Flash. The beloved Toronto wrestler Whipper Billy Watson warned him against being seen dating white women. A promoter in St. Louis complained he sounded in interviews to be too educated for a black man. He resisted the urging of others to engage in humiliating racist tropes, such as wearing chains, being whipped or eating fried chicken. When he was to unveil a new masked character, a promoter wanted to call him the Black Stud. The wrestler sweet-talked him into settling for the less offensive Sweet Ebony Diamond.

His primary ring name was borrowed from the boxers Rocky Marciano and Jack Johnson – the latter the first black world heavyweight champion – a choice made more in tribute than with notions of grandeur. He legally changed his name in 1986.

“I don’t want to be remembered as somebody better than anyone else,” he once said. “I was just country, trying to make it in the big city.”

Mr. Johnson was born in Amherst, N.S., as Wayde Douglas Bowles on Aug. 24, 1944, to the former Muriel Lillian Gay and James Henry Bowles. His father’s family trace their lineage in Cumberland County to a Black Loyalist whose name appears in the Book of Negroes, a military ledger of those who arrived by British ships after defeat in the American Revolutionary War. At age 19, his mother – who claimed mixed African, Irish and Mi’kmaq heritage – had married a 46-year-old divorced African Methodist Episcopal minister. Five years later, she married Mr. Bowles, a 54-year-old divorcé. The future wrestler was the fourth of five sons in the blended family, which lived in a small home across from the local cemetery.

Mr. Johnson’s father worked as a miner and a coal foundry furnaceman before dying of lung cancer. His mother then found work as a nurse’s aide.

“We weren’t starving, but we scrimped and scraped to put food on the table,” Mr. Johnson wrote in his 2019 autobiography Soulman: The Rocky Johnson Story, written with Scott Teal.

(The book, which was released last fall, has since been withdrawn by ECW Press, which has removed all mention of the title from its website. No official reason has been given.)

The youth hitchhiked to Toronto with a cardboard suitcase in hand and $2 in his pocket at age 14 after crowning his mother’s alcoholic and abusive boyfriend with a coal shovel, knocking him out. He was so poor and hungry he stole apples from roadside orchards along the way.

He worked at a car wash and later helped make deliveries for a smoked-fish company near the stockyards in West Toronto. Training as a boxer, he got under-the-table payments in unofficial exhibitions. Official boxing records show he had two professional fights in Nova Scotia.

A chance encounter with a wrestler seeking a training partner changed Mr. Johnson’s life. He attended Jack Wentworth’s wrestling school in Hamilton, Ont., before making his debut in his home province in the summer of 1965.

That fall, he got a break. Mr. Watson, the wrestler and promoter, brought Mr. Johnson back to Toronto to encourage black voters in East York to support his Progressive Conservative campaign for election as a member of Parliament. In the end, Mr. Watson lost to a Liberal incumbent.

Mr. Johnson mostly appeared on undercards as a filler, though after a few months he faced Sweet Daddy Siki, also known as Mr. Irresistible, in the main event of a five-card program at Exhibition Auditorium in Regina. (He lost.) His flair in the ring during Stu Hart’s prairie promotions indicated Mr. Johnson was an up-and-coming star.

In addition to his repertoire of jabs, takedowns, arm drags, dropkicks and acrobatic kip-ups, in which he could spring to his feet from lying on his back, Mr. Johnson adopted a version of a foot shuffle he had seen Mr. Ali demonstrate in Toronto while training for his memorable 1966 clash with George Chuvalo.

Mr. Johnson won his first pro wrestling title in 1967 as the Canadian tag-team champions while wrestling in Vancouver with Don Leo Jonathan, who was billed as the Mormon Giant. He later added several single and tag-team titles in the Southern U.S., as well as in California, Tennessee and Oregon. The Soulman also wrestled in Japan, South Korea, Western Samoa (now Samoa) and Tonga.

Away from the ring, Mr. Johnson operated a cleaning business in Pennsylvania. After moving to Florida, he was hired temporarily as an activities leader for children and youth at a community centre in the town of Davie, outside Miami. In 2001, he was investigated by police for theft and inappropriately touching a 23-year-old on the buttocks. Though the state attorney alleged there was “sufficient evidence” for charges, none were laid. Mr. Johnson went on to become a booker, trainer, promoter and publicist for the Urban Wrestling Alliance, a short-lived circuit based in California, where television matches were taped.

Mr. Johnson was still married to the former Una Sparks when he first met Feagaimaleata Fitisemanu Maivia, known as Ata, a Hawaiian-born beauty and singer who was the daughter of wrestling royalty. At first, Mr. Johnson thought Ata was snobbish, while she was disgusted by his tobacco-chewing habit. Her father, the wrestler and stuntman High Chief Peter Maivia, and mother, the promoter Lia Maivia, did not wish for their daughter to cavort with a wrestler. In any case, they had a son in 1972. The boy watched from ringside during his father’s heyday of mayhem in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In time, father showed his son the ropes – literally by shoving him into them and showing how to bounce back, a common wrestling move.

“I trained him in every possible way, and I even tried to discourage him because I wanted to know how much he wanted it,” Mr. Johnson told the Tampa Tribune newspaper in 1999.

As it turned out, The Rock’s first comedic performance was for a television episode of That ’70s Show in which he portrayed his father.

Mr. Johnson died at home in Lutz, Fla., north of Tampa, on Jan. 15 after a deep vein thrombosis led to a pulmonary embolism and a heart attack, according to his actor son. He leaves his third wife, Dana Martin, whom he married in 2004. His survivors include a daughter and a son from his first marriage, as well as Dwayne Johnson from his second marriage. He was predeceased by brothers Lewis (Buster) Ishmael, who died in 2001, and Mervyn Gesner Bowles, who died in 2009.

On news of Mr. Johnson’s death, wrestling cards opened with a 10-bell salute in which a crowd uncharacteristically remains silent as the bell tolls, a dignified farewell in a sport which is otherwise known for heinous and infamous routines.

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