My second major problem was to find a partner, that is, a heavyweight champ, a man who could look like a fantastic athlete but also say the lines that would be required of this particular character who was named Apollo Creed.Īt first, we had professional fighters come in. In other words, boxing is merely a matter of geometrics and guts. You move around that partner and the objective is to move with the flow rather than against the flow it's counterpoint, countermovement, counterbalance. My timing on the heavy bag was ridiculous I continually sprained my wrist and bent my thumbs back and brought smiles to the faces of observing fighters.įormer football player Carl Weathers, left, proved to be the perfect fit for "Apollo Creed."īut I studied thousands and thousands and thousands of feet of fight footage and concluded that boxing is a muscular dance of sorts. It wasn't going to be easy, because I couldn't even fool myself. I didn't know how I was going to fool the public into thinking that I was a professional fighter with 12 to 15 years of experience. He was to the '70s what Chaplin's Little Tramp was to the '20s.īecoming a boxer and finding Apollo Creed It just didn't conjure up waves of empathy even from me and I was sure it wouldn't do it from an audience either. So I took my story and injected it into the body of Rocky Balboa because no one, I felt, would be interested in listening to or watching or reading a story about a down-and-out, struggling actor/writer. I felt Rocky to be the vehicle for that kind of sensibility. The second ingredient had to be my particular story, my inability to be recognized. All he required from life was a warm bed and some food and maybe a laugh during the day. I was going to make a creation called Rocky Balboa, a man from the streets, a walking cliché of sorts, the all-American tragedy, a man who didn't have much mentality but had incredible emotion and patriotism and spirituality and good nature even though nature had not been good to him. That night I went home and I had the beginning of my character. This is why he had been training for 34 years. I am sure that moment meant more to Wepner than any money he could ever receive from fighting because now he had run the complete circle. The character of "Rocky Balboa" was partially inspired by former heavyweight Chuck Wepner. Well, the history books will read that he went 15 rounds and established himself as one of the few men who had ever gone the distance with Muhammad Ali, and he can hold his head up high forever no matter what happens. He would barely go three rounds, most of the predictions said. But the fight was not regarded as a serious battle. Wepner, a battling bruising type of club fighter who had never really made the big, big time, was now having his shot. Through fate or whatever, I ended up at the Muhammad Ali-Chuck Wepner fight. Editor's Note: The following is excerpted from "The Official Rocky Scrapbook." Copyright 1977 by Sylvester Stallone.
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