WWE traces The Rock’s catchphrase to a 1998 interview with Gennifer Flowers at WrestleMania XIV. In a report published the following year, Dwayne Johnson recalled saying the line, seeing Flowers smirk, and realizing it could work. The surviving accounts differ slightly on the opening words, and neither supplies a full record of how the phrase was created.
When did The Rock first say the catchphrase?
WWE’s WrestleMania XIV history page identifies an interview with Gennifer Flowers as the first use of “if you smell what The Rock is cooking.” A contemporary report in The Philadelphia Inquirer, published on March 28, 1999, likewise places the debut at the previous year’s WrestleMania—WrestleMania XIV, held in 1998.
Neither account gives the interview’s exact calendar date or provides a transcript. The supported answer is therefore 1998, during the Flowers interview at WrestleMania XIV, rather than a more precise day or time.
How Johnson remembered the moment
In Jennifer Weiner’s 1999 report, Johnson described Flowers’s reaction after he said the line: “I said it, and she just gave me this smirk, and I knew it would work,” he said. That recollection makes the origin feel less like a carefully announced slogan and more like a trial balloon that seemed to land in the moment.
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The report also discusses the broader WWF writing environment: some responses came from writers, while performers sometimes supplied their own. Johnson said his slogans came from him, but the available accounts do not establish the complete creative process behind this particular phrase or rule out collaboration. It is accurate to say he recalled saying it and reading Flowers’s reaction as a sign it had potential—not that the evidence proves he devised every word entirely alone.
Why accounts quote the opening differently
The wording is not identical across the sources. The 1999 Inquirer report prints “Can you smell what the Rock is cooking?” WWE’s event history uses “if you smell what The Rock is cooking,” while a 2007 WWE retrospective writes, “If you smell…what The Rock…is cooking.” These are differing written versions of a phrase performed in promos; the records do not show that Johnson used precisely the same wording every time.
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What later WWE material does—and does not—show
WWE’s 2007 retrospective includes a later promo using the catchphrase. That confirms its continued association with The Rock, but it is not evidence of when or how the phrase originated. The origin account remains the Flowers interview at WrestleMania XIV, supported by WWE’s event history and Johnson’s recollection reported in 1999.
A 2024 TKO/WWE intellectual-property agreement offers a separate, later point of context: it includes the tagline within its defined “Rock IP” and assigns that defined property to DJIP. The agreement also excludes specified WWE audiovisual footage from that definition. Tagline rights under that agreement should not be confused with ownership of the original interview recording.
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What the record leaves open
- The exact date of the Flowers interview is not stated in the cited accounts.
- No full transcript of the interview is provided, so the sources do not settle every spoken-word detail.
- The evidence supports Johnson’s recollection of the moment, but not a definitive account of every writer or collaborator who may have contributed to the catchphrase’s development.
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