Lisa Purves was 18 the first time she reached out to the professional wrestler who’d fathered her. On that occasion, he hung up. A few years later, she tried again and left a message. She never heard back. Before she turned 30, she once more got her dad on the phone and told him who she was—and once more he hung up. Lisa says she went so far as to ask other wrestlers over the years to speak to her father for her, but nothing ever came of it.
Growing up, Lisa only ever told her best friends about her dad, who spent more than two decades in the ring, climbing to the upper ranks of WWE. “I was really embarrassed that my father didn’t want me,” she says today, at 53. It took decades before she confronted that embarrassment.
Illustration by The Sporting Press; MediaPunch/Shutterstock (Rocky Johnson); Chris Ryan/Corbis/Getty Images (Dwayne Johnson); from second to left: Courtesy of Aaron Fowler; Courtesy of Lisa Purves; Courtesy of Adrian Bowles; Courtesy of Trevor Edwards; Courtesy of Paula Parsons
