'The Rock' remembers Nashville past

Before he was a wrestling champ and world-famous film star, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was an average teenager, attending high school in Nashville.

Actually, he was anything but average. That's plain to see in the high school yearbook photo Johnson recently shared on Instagram. By the time he was 16, he says he was 6 feet, four inches tall, weighed 225 pounds, and had grown a "dead caterpillar" mustache.

"All the kids in every high school thought I was an undercover cop," he wrote in the caption.

Johnson attended four high schools across the country, and two of them were in Music City: McGavock and Glencliff. It's not clear which school his Instagram photo came from.

Johnson's father's professional wrestling career brought the family to town in 1987. As Johnson remembered it on Instagram, he was "hangin' out in (honky) tonk dive bars on Music Row and hustlin' cars from crackheads."

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"Hustlin' cars?"

Johnson gave the full story to The Tennessean in a 2004 interview. He bought a run-down Thunderbird (on Lower Broadway, actually) for $40.

''But they got the last laugh," he said. "They had the gas key. I think I left the car in a Burger King parking lot.''