ME, AGED TEN: I consider the Rocky movies to be the most important movies in the entire universe*
ME, AGED THIRTY: the ten-year-old was right†
The first time I saw Rocky, the first Rocky movie, was by sheer chance. I’d been trying to record some blood-gulch eighties B-movie from late-night TV, and set the video recorder to the wrong channel, instead capturing the last 20 minutes of Match of the Day and the entirety of Rocky, and at first I watched it sort of waiting for gore: waiting for Rocky from Rocky to split open at the chest, for grey tentacles to shoot from his glistening torso, Adrian ravaged by hell beasts, spurts of blood getting all on Mickey. But something else happened instead: I fell instantly, irrevocably, in love with Rocky Balboa. Rocky doesn’t even start quickly: it’s 122 minutes of a slow build to a high crescendo, and all those iconic scenes – punching the meat, sprinting up the steps, going 15 rounds with the Champion! Of! The! World! – actually come in a fast volley at the end of the film, jab-jab, jab-jab, after an awful lot of slow-moving life stuff first. Rocky the first Rocky film is a lot about Rocky being poor, and listless. Rocky taking Adrian ice skating and completely fucking up his first-date banter. There are extended sequences in Rocky where he buys turtle food. Very little of Rocky is about Rocky getting hit really hard in the face, and quite a lot of it is about acapella street gangs. What I am saying is it is a boxing movie with a heart, which is of very little appeal to a ten-year-old boy. And yet: catch me shadow boxing and ducking my head down in the front room of my house. Catch my parents yelling up the stairs after bedtime as they listen to me thump on the floor practising my footwork.*
As soon as I saw Rocky, I had to see Rocky II. The week after that they played Rocky III. Rocky IV, the greatest geopolitical gesture of peace that will ever be seen in our lifetime, came after that. Then Rocky V, which we’ll skim over. Over and over again, until the tapes wound out. I have seen Mickey die a hundred times. I have seen Apollo Creed’s preternaturally cocky exhibition entrance a hundred more. At one of my first parties in London, when I was supposed to be meeting people and making friends and, hey why not, macking girls, I noticed Rocky IV playing in the background, the red turned all the way up on the TV, and then sat there in silence and watched it: ‘Hey,’ people whispered to me, nestling next to me with a beer, ‘this is a party? What are you doing?’ And I would say: shut up. Rocky has just grown a beard and is about to run up a mountain. And then, when Drago was defeated, and the whole Russian crowd rose to its feet, when I can change and you can change, after I shed a single tear, I stood up abruptly and walked out. There is no party that is better than watching Rocky IV.
What I am saying is: I am more primed than anyone alive to adjudge which of the Rocky movies in the Rocky movie canon is the greatest Rocky movie. And it is Rocky IV. I’m now going to spend a really long time explaining to you why.*
* * *†
Here’s Rocky’s tactic for every fight he has ever had: get hit in the head until the other guy gets either bored or exhausted of hitting him in the head, and then break that guy’s ribs, then win. There was one fight where he didn’t do this, and it was against Clubber Lang in Rocky III – Clubber, a real breathe-fire-and-shit-out-more-fire kind of guy, seriously capital-T terrifying to a ten-year-old me because of this particular primal scream he did when he was swinging, as if Mr. T was yelling the sound ‘auGH!’ into a cavern that goes deep into the earth – so there was one fight when Rocky didn’t do this, the head-head-head-head-ribs thing, and it only came after Clubber absolutely decimated his head-head-head-head-ribs thing by overriding it with sheer head-head-head-head-head, plus punching his trainer Mickey to death pre-fight as some sort of exquisite flex, and then Rocky – redemption arc – had to retrain in the ways of his old foe Apollo Creed, who taught him simple boxing methods like ‘moving your feet’ and ‘slipping punches instead of taking them, fully, in the head’, and then he beat Clubber Lang on the re-match. But what I am saying, fundamentally, is Rocky has exactly one fighting technique, and there are seven entire movies about that technique: Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky V, Rocky Balboa and, technically, Creed.
There are themes that run through the Rockys, is what I’m saying, if you look closely. Only when you know and understand the central tenets that prop up the idea of Rocky (and every film about him) can you begin to understand not only who he is, but all the versions of him along the way. Rocky came out in 1976, and was at that point the greatest movie ever made. Rocky II came out in 1979 and eclipsed it, then Rocky III (1982), an uninterrupted spell of Rocky oneupmanship that continued until 1990’s Rocky V, which sucked. Many Rocky scholars – myself, for a number of years, included – will not actually admit that V ever happened, stating instead the series skipped from Rocky IV (1984) to Rocky Balboa (2006), but to ignore the story of Rocky V – of Tommy ‘The Machine’ Gunn, of Rocky slipping ever further into post-fight delirium, of the most obvious father–son–son relationship of the whole franchise – is to ignore a number of central themes of the series, writ so large they glow like the Hollywood sign, and drives us further from establishing what a Rocky movie truly is. I have watched Rocky V three entire times in my life, which I believe is more than anyone in history has ever managed to endure, including the editor of Rocky V. There is no greater authority on this shoddy, shoddy, mess of a film than me. It is, against everything, a Rocky movie.
So here’s what qualifies a Rocky movie as a Rocky movie. From there we can figure out which is the best one of them all, and establish that it is IV:
— Rocky has to get punched in the head and not die. Rocky getting punched in the head and not dying is basically all III and IV are about, and a lot of II, and quite a lot of Act Three of I, and V as well (although V opens with a shot of Rocky in a hot shower in Soviet Russia, panting and begging for Adrian as blood tips out of his ears, so pummelled by the robotic Ivan Drago that he truly does flirt with death, for a while there, but then miraculously he recovers enough to take Tommy ‘The Machine’ Gunn on in a no-gloves street fight, where he gets punched directly in the head a ton of times, like really hard, and doesn’t at all die). In Rocky Balboa Rocky gets punched in the head, absurdly (he is 55 years old!), and does not die. In Creed he does not get punched in the head, but he does nearly die. What have we learned about that? A pretty strong theory is that Rocky needs to be punched in the head a lot to live. Anyway: unless Rocky gets clanged in the head so hard his kids can feel it, it’s not – I’m afraid – a Rocky movie.
— Ideally Rocky trains insanely for the fight he is about to have. In Rocky, Rocky was so poor he had to train with the tools he had available to him – he had to chug raw eggs, and run up art-gallery steps, and punch beef ribs, and not fuck his girlfriend because his legs would get ruined (a running theme throughout the films is that women ruin legs, and if you’ve ever tried to go to the bathroom after having sex with one you will definitely know this. Rocky, a devout Catholic, is an oddly sexless man, especially given that, in Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone was in such good shape he was essentially a walking erection, just muscles on top of other muscles, and Talia Shire opposite him was a full and bodacious eighties babe. I have never wanted to watch two people fuck more, and yet, I can’t actually imagine them fucking. This should have been a footnote, not brackets*). In Rocky II he had to learn to catch a chicken with his bare hands, and that somehow made him fast enough to beat Apollo Creed, who was a simulation of Ali in his prime, i.e. utterly unbeatable unless you were a chicken catcher, I guess. In III he got too far into professional training methods – prize-fight training in public in a town hall, with marching bands and photo opportunities – and got his arsehole kicked in, which is why he had to go and train in Miami doing swiming and shuttle runs up the beach. In IV, with the Soviet Union bearing down on him, he chopped logs and sprinted through snow so fast Russian spies tailing him in a car span out and crashed, and he chugged up a mountain and said ‘YEAH!’ at the top. In V Rocky never really trained so it doesn’t count. In Balboa, with calcium deposits on his joints and ruined knees, he can’t run or spar much, so instead he focuses on building blunt-trauma force, which he does by lifting weights and hitting old tyres with a hammer. It’s hard to imagine what kind of boxer Rocky would have been if he just went to, like, a normal gym.
— Rocky has to have grim motivation. In Rocky, all he wanted to do was prove to the world that he wasn’t a bum (in the Rockyverse, ‘bum’ is the absolute worst insult you can level at someone, and the worst thing you could be: Rocky was tired of hearing it and tired of being it): his only motivation was himself. In II, Rocky couldn’t train because Adrian was in a birth-induced coma, until she woke up from the coma and said – first word, out of a coma – ‘Win!’, so he trained really hard and won. In III Mickey was dead and he wanted to avenge him. In IV Apollo was dead and he wanted to avenge him. (The lingering spectre of death is a running theme in everything Rocky ever does. He basically doesn’t do anything unless someone just died about it. Imagine trying to get the man to put the bins out.) In V he was basically only fighting because Tommy goaded him into it outside a pub (canonically, Rocky has only been in a pub twice in his life, once in I and then again 24 years later in V). In Balboa he was fighting because Adrian was dead and he was— well, not wanting to avenge her, exactly, but mainly because he was bored. Rocky never goes into a fight just to have a fight. There has to be something more significant on the line.
— Ideally at some point a doctor has to very bluntly tell Rocky that if he ever gets punched in the head he will die and Rocky will say ‘I gotta take that chance, doc.’ Over the course of the series Rocky has: been declared blind in one eye (II); told he has irreversible brain damage and that the next punch will kill him (V); been actively denied a boxing licence because he is too old and broken (Balboa). In II Adrian didn’t want him boxing again and then in IV she’s the one who urges him to fight. In V he was told an overly enthusiastic nod would kill his brain, and later in the film he goes three rounds with the newly crowned world champ, then 16 years later goes ten rounds against the pound-for-pound world champion, and still only loses on a split decision, and doesn’t even die in the ring once: Rocky has been living in a state of potential brain death for a decade-and-a-half. In III (1982) Rocky first attempts to retire, a feat he does not successfully achieve until 2006’s Balboa. In Creed he is diagnosed with cancer, and I still wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to get up and start swinging until the credits were rolling. The only rightful way for the Creed trilogy to end is with young Adonis Creed fighting against his old mentor in the ring, and it goes ten rounds and a judges’ split, and the judges inexplicably give the belt back to a 72-year-old Rocky, who screams ‘ADRIAN!’ once then dies. Until Sylvester Stallone himself expires, I won’t truly admit that Rocky is retired, and even then they can do holograms of 2Pac now, so. Rocky can never retire.
— A crowd that was previously very against Rocky starts chanting his name (I, II, IV), or a crowd that was indifferent to him starts chanting his name out of respect (Balboa), or a crowd that was on his side to start with watches him win then chants his name (III). Someone’s name has to get chanted, alright? It’s the rules.
— It’s good but not essential that a woman realises she loves a man when she sees ten shades of shit get kicked out of him in the ring. This was the denouement of Rocky (‘ADRIAN!’), and a theme in the shot-for-shot remake Creed, but there are other moments, too: the wicked redhead in V only gets horny for Tommy Gunn when she watches him win a title; Apollo Creed’s wife only becomes a main character the moment she slo-mo screams ‘NO!!!!’ in the seconds before he convulses and dies; Drago’s wife, Ludmilla, only really admires her husband when he’s robotically punching men until they die. A woman’s love, the Rocky movies tell us, is a hard-won and actually quite dark and nasty thing. It’s not actually a good advertisement for it.
— For some reason a running theme in the films is ‘extremely close family members of the boxer absolutely cannot be arsed to attend the fight he’s in and so watch it from home’, which honestly seems rude to me.
— There has to be a distorted version of the father–son relationship, this is crucial. Rocky does not visibly have any parents, ever – he doesn’t call them or invite them to his fight in Rocky, so it is assumed they are dead, and he never talks about them to anyone, so it’s unclear what the fuck is going on there. In that space he finds surrogates: either Rocky finds a father figure in the vacant hole where he’s left without one (Rocky with Mickey, although it’s unclear where Rocky’s parents actually are); loses his father figure and goes mad with grief (III); ignores the kid he actually has (IV, V); tries to reach out to the kid he’s ignored for decades (Balboa) and finds him to be a bit of a dickhead so just takes on another adopted kid instead (also Balboa); takes on another adopted son in a very begrudging but ultimately fulfilling way (Creed). This can also go with animals: over the course of the movies Rocky loves two dogs, two turtles, one woman, one false father and two false sons, and sort of, maybe, one actual son. His one true love? My friends: it is the noble art of boxing.
— Rocky has to go the maximum number of rounds the fight allows. The man has ended a fight early in his career once, and that is only because he was afraid he would get too knackered and lose (III: again, a full 24 years before his final, all rounds, televised fight). Every other time, Rocky will get punched in the head until the authorities tell him not to.
The first film we can immediately rule out of the running to be The Greatest Rocky Movie And Therefore The Greatest Movie Ever Made (hereby T.G.R.M.A.T.T.G.M. E.M.), then, is Rocky III: despite having the first on-screen death and therefore the greatest funeral shot ever taken (Rocky, two completely black eyes, Versace-cut suit, aviator shades, not only the best funeral outfit ever worn but possibly the best outfit ever worn, and I’m warning my friends that if any of you die over the summer months I am blackening both eyes and wearing aviators to your send-off, there is nothing about that you can do), III doesn’t dwell enough on father–son or son–father relationships*: it exists in the grey zone between Rocky having made it and Rocky on the descent, grasping on to desperate fronds of love from his family. Rocky III is an erection of a film – Sylvester Stallone was cut into the shape of his life for it, and there are entire slow-mo scenes of him and Carl Weathers sprinting down a Miami beach, the camera literally zooming in on their rock-hard eighties dicks bouncing around in short shorts – but there are too many red marks against it for it to truly thrive. Rocky finishes the final fight in three rounds? That’s not very Rocky. Rocky doesn’t tell any goofy jokes because he’s too depressed about Mickey dying? Again: not very Rocky. Loads of very racist jokes dropped by Paulie when he gets to Apollo Creed’s Miami gym? Not very Rocky. The worst Rocky film, I’m sad to say it, is Rocky III.
To consider the next couple of places we need to interrogate the Rocky movies on a number of different metrics.
HEY: WHO WOULD WIN A BATTLE ROYALE FIGHT BETWEEN EVERY ITERATION OF ROCKY FROM THE ROCKY MOVIES?
Do not worry about the logistics of this, just the outcome. We know from Rocky III, when Rocky had an exhibition match with an enormous, furious Hulk Hogan (as Thunderlips), and from Rocky V where he had a bins-against-heads street fight with Tommy Gunn, that Rocky can exist outside the rules of boxing: that he does not need a single ring or a single opponent to fight. So every Rocky, 1976 to 2006, is for whatever reason in a ring and mad at each other. Rocky from Rocky V is first to die: his brain is the most fragile of all the Rockies, he is fully clothed, he has absolutely no motivation to fight, he’s wearing a hat. Rocky V is dead, now. Next is Balboa-era Rocky, who is 55 years old, who is eliminated because he is 55 years old: even in the Rockyverse, he would be pounded to death by any other iteration of Rocky, no doubt about it (the only fighter strong enough to beat Rocky – truly – is another, younger, sadder-about-death version of Rocky). I have to make a controversial admission and say Rocky from Rocky I would be filled in next: despite being the hungriest of all the Rockies, and the youngest, he’s also the most raw, and has not developed the skills to fight a true ring-weary boxer yet (Rocky I only has one recorded win – against Spider Rico – and one technical draw: even the barely developed Rocky II would fuck him up). This leaves three remaining Rockies: II, III and IV. Rocky III is a curious beast: he loses his first film fight to Clubber Lang, then gets caught up in deep grief over Mickey, but after a make-or-break beachside pep talk from Adrian turns into the most in-shape-and-come-out-swinging boxer of his career: Rocky III lurches from inept to world beatingly insane. Rocky II has the technique, the belief and the hunger, but he’s never really felt what it is to win, and his technique (head–head–head–head–ribs) is unlocked by Clubber Lang in the next film: he is Achilles, monstrously powerful but with one masterful flaw. Then you have Rocky IV, who is boxing for fucking America. The Rocky from Rocky IV can take the most punishment of all the Rockies – there is an argument to be made that the entire series of films is actually a sort of pondering on sadomachoism, and that Rocky’s frequent refrains of ‘come on, hit me!’ actually come from somewhere deeper, darker (is Rocky, shorn of a dad, desperately looking for male authority in the ring? Does he want to be hit to feel something, anything? My theory: yes. Yes, yes, yes. The dude lives to have his ass kicked), and that reluctance to die when he’s essentially being punched by tank projectiles truly makes him a force to contend with. Ultimately, gun to my head, I’m saying III takes it – Stallone was in stunning condition for the filming of it, and it’s the first time Rocky put on the famous, at-once-cursed-and-haunted Apollo Creed-loaned America flag shorts, and they bring with them a sort of magical victory hoodoo – and he would take II and IV out over 15 increasingly brutal and bloody rounds. But it would be a close one.
HEY: WHICH OF THE ROCKY VILLAINS IS THE BEST ROCKY VILLAIN?
The best Rocky villain is Thunderlips from Rocky III, because he is basically Hulk Hogan just playing himself, brother, and also because Paulie hits him with a chair. But because this isn’t a licensed bout I can’t count him, so we need to go back into the vaults: Tommy ‘The Machine’ Gunn isn’t the best because he’s a punk kid who gets sunk in about 20 punches and there is not enough trash talk there to legitimise a beef – Rocky just beats the shit out of him to teach him a lesson (the first time, weirdly, that this ever happens in the Rocky films: there are a number of times when you would think Rocky could do with beating the shit out of someone to teach them a lesson, most notably Paulie in every single film, but also his son, repeatedly, who despite being played by a number of actors and written by a number of writers always, without fail, comes out as an asshole). Clubber Lang is an intensely scary motherfucker but ultimately comes up short, and when he’s sunk he’s sunk in three, never to be seen or heard of again. Ivan Drago builds a sense of pre-emptive dread more than any other Rocky villain alive – he kills Apollo Creed, man! He kills him! By just punching him! He kills Apollo Creed! – but on beef alone, Apollo takes it. I almost took points off of Apollo for ultimately becoming Rocky’s greatest and best friend, which does sort of invalidate the villain arc a bit, but then I remembered in Rocky II when Rocky first retired from boxing and went to work in a meat-packing factory, and Apollo Creed put a full-page newspaper ad out where he superimposed Rocky’s head onto a rooster’s body and called him ‘The Italian Chicken’. I mean. My guy. That’s incredible cage rattling, right there. ‘The Italian Chicken’. Doesn’t even make sense! A ridiculous thing to spend money on. Apollo is the best villain, which further legitimises the first two Rocky movies as being T.G.R.M. A.T.T.G.M.E.M., and further invalidates III – where he turned from heel to face – from being any further part of this.
HEY: DID PAULIE FUCK THAT ROBOT IN ROCKY IV?
Oh my god, undoubtedly. Perhaps you have cleansed this from your mind: Paulie, in Rocky IV, has a sexy-voiced servile robot, and he fucks it (the fact that Paulie fucks the robot is never actually addressed on screen, making this non-canon, but he fucks that ’bot, man). Consider the evidence: Paulie, throughout the Rocky movies, actually acts as the series’ main running antagonist: in Rocky, he abuses Adrian, throwing her roast turkey out in a drunken rage; in II, he goes and shouts at Adrian for distracting Rocky by being pregnant, and in doing so forces her into an early labour then a coma; in III, he swings for Rocky in a car park after Rocky bails him out of jail then goes on later to be really, really racist; in V, he is the reason for the Balboa’s bankruptcy; in Balboa he is grumpy, in Creed he is dead. At no point is it really addressed why Rocky and Paulie are even friends in the first place*, seeing as they have no real shared interests, that Paulie is a functioning alcoholic while Rocky is essentially teetotal, that there is a great age difference between them, that they don’t seem, fundamentally, to even get on. The only shared ground between Rocky and Paulie is that fundamental, primal, urgent need to not be thought of as a bum: when Rocky escapes bum-ville and ascends to the world championship, it casts a shadow over Paulie, under which he festers; Paulie never, truly, proved himself not to be a bum on his own terms, and Rocky sees that and lets him ride in the back of his success car, letting him run corner for him and spoiling him with lavish gifts. Such as: the robot he fucks.
Paulie melts, a little, under the servitude of his sex robot. He trains her to bring him cold ones and ice cream. She plays romantic music and he says that she loves him. Apollo Creed, who is on a suicide mission to die, is the only one freaked out by a robot that can move and talk and love at an advancement in technology that is far beyond what science is capable even now, 30 years later (Paulie’s AI-enabled fuckbot is the greatest evidence yet that Rocky exists in a separate, fantasy universe to ours): everyone else is just happy that Paulie finally found a lover and a friend. Rocky is a sexless movie series – Rocky’s committed Catholicism paired with the women-weaken-legs thing means the horniest Rocky personally ever gets is a moment where he takes his vest off in the first movie, and I’m pretty sure Rocky Jr. was conceived immaculately because there’s no way Rocky and Adrian fucked – so a sudden frisson of pure, electric sexual charisma jolts a room to its feet, which is why the sparks between Paulie and the robot he fucks are so significant. Consider the two Paulies: Paulie #1, (1976–1985), the first Paulie, screaming and yelling until the saliva comes out, pummelling with a baseball bat; and Paulie #2, (1985–death), serene and laid-back, practically post-orgasmic with chill, eating ice cream in a vest. Does Paulie fuck the robot? Paulie fucks the robot like crazy. I would argue Paulie would have been dead by Balboa if he didn’t. Paulie’s fuck robot gave his heart the capacity to love, and by extension gave him ten more years his anger and smoking didn’t deserve. Paulie hit that thing harder than Drago did Apollo.
THE FULL SPECTRUM OF MASCULINITY AS REPRESENTED BY ROCKY IN THE ROCKY MOVIES
The weird thing about Rocky is he is a shifting shape, a character who never truly settles as one. Compare the Rocky in Rocky, for instance, with Rocky II: in the first movie he is a lonely, unsettled human, chomping for change, urgent for something more: in Rocky II he is just spectacularly into god, just way too into god. In Rocky V, if we dial it all the way forward, he is just a very brain-damaged man who cannot pick up a single social cue: all of this is erased by the time of Balboa and Creed. Rocky anchors himself on two core tenets, throughout: that he is sweet and empathetically thoughtful almost to a fault, and that he is extremely, extremely masculine. And one way or another, Rocky has managed to encapsulate the entire and full range of human masculinity – every facet and every flaw – across the seven movies. Every man alive should be able to see something of himself in Rocky Balboa. Here is every possible man:
ROCKY: wears comfortable soft knits a lot, deliberately flexes his arms over a pull-up bar in front of Adrian to make his biceps look better, filled with a fragile and easily shattered romantic intent, lonely + afraid
ROCKY II: Father, Husband, Provider, Coward, Fighter. Ill-advisedly buys a sports car
ROCKY III: The Sexiest Athlete Who Ever Existed Is Sad Because His Dad Died
ROCKY IV: Rocky IV is essentially every bloke when his mate gets in a bar fight, i.e. converts quickly into a sort of barking dog who vows to chin the guy who started it, only in this case the friend is Apollo Creed (dead.) and the bloke who started it is the hardest boxer in the world and you have to go to Russia instead of the alleyway outside if you want to finish the thing
ROCKY V: Ignoring His Actual Son to Instead Focus on His Other, Surrogate Son, Who Is Better at Boxing than His Actual Son Is
BALBOA: Fallen lion who struggles w/ dwindling testosterone levels, plus also death of wife
CREED: Just wants to read a newspaper and take 45-minute shits without anyone bothering him for anything
If you have to ask, Rocky and my masculinities cross in three ways: incredibly solid later-life hairline, Does Not Know How To Speak To Children But Tries Anyway, almost criminally bad with money.
A NOTE ON CREED
After re-watching it again recently, I have to admit that the most whole and perfect Rocky movie is Creed. It has everything: a busted father–son relationship, a surrogate father–son relationship, a boxer with it all to prove, a special scene where someone hands over Apollo’s assy old boxing shorts, a truly fearsome opposition fighter, a three-way montage scene, an unhorny romantic subplot, bizarre training methods, kids doing wheelies, the constant spectre of death. The only thing is doesn’t have – and this is crucial – is Rocky Balboa being absolutely fucking tanked in the head, because in this film he is in his sixties and half-dying of cancer. So for that reason, I have to disqualify Creed from even counting as a Rocky movie. If Rocky does not get punched in the head in the film – even once – then I am afraid that, though it undoubtedly exists in the Rockyverse, it is not a Rocky film. The objectively best Rocky movie cannot actually be counted as a Rocky movie.
WHAT IS THE BEST ROCKY MOVIE, THEN?
Listen, I lie. I told you we would be adhering to structure and framework when judging this but I lied. We’re going on personal opinion and personal opinion alone. The best Rocky movie is Rocky IV, because he fights a man so hard the entirety of Russia stands up and claps, because James Brown is in it in the maddest cameo in movie history, because if I can change then you can change, because Rocky grows a beard, because the montage is a pure eighties electroshock hard-on, and because Paulie fucks the robot. The best Rocky movie is Rocky IV.
AND SO THE MORAL AT THE END
Why do I love Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa so much? I’ve sat gazing at the city beyond me while trying to think it through. I suppose the beating, pulsing heart of Rocky is a fear of failure, a fear of rejection, a fear of being found out: he only ever goes head-first into that Apollo fight in Rocky to prove to everyone that he isn’t a nobody, that life hasn’t kicked it out of him yet, that he’s someone, worth something. He’s a candy-box-sweet slow-swinging idiot holding it down for a close-knit family he deeply, almost pathologically loves, and when everyone who means anything to him starts to die he takes the anger and the hurt of it and buries it down, pummels it down inside him, occasionally burbling up as a kind of wobbling self-rage, but most often coming out just in more desire, doubling out as more pride. Whenever something goes critically wrong in Rocky’s life (Adrian’s coma, II; Mickey’s death, III) he gives up entirely, and I admire that trait in a man. Rocky Balboa has been my most beloved sportsman for the last two decades of my life, and he doesn’t even exist. Rocky Balboa got to the dizzy heights of the toughest sport in the game, and he did it without even really knowing how to box. That’s why I love the Rocky movies: as well as being erections-as-montages eighties punch flicks, they are also about characters who contain multitudes, heart as well as iron. If he dies on screen I will sob until they have to escort me out of the theatre.
I was in a bar recently watching a pay-per-view boxing event, and there was a man behind me in winkle-pickers and an ironed white shirt, and I immediately got the vibe off him that he both works in finance and does cocaine. ‘Yes, AJ!’ he was saying, single clenched fist in the air, whenever Anthony Joshua, the televised winner of the bout, did a good punch in the head. He spilled an almost entire drink on my shoes and told his friend: ‘Thing about boxing, is,’ he said. ‘Thing about boxing, right: it’s tactical, like chess. Boxing is chess.’ We moved, we left the bar. I couldn’t deal with being near that.
But in his own high and irritating way, he was correct. ‘Boxing is chess’ is something people who don’t know a lot about chess and only know a little about boxing say about boxing, but it does go some way to explaining the tactical masterclass every boxer undertakes when he goes anything more than one round with a fellow pugilist. Boxing is an extreme athletic undertaking – your body is working at the absolute maximum a body can go out, for 15 consecutive intensive rounds, and all this is happening while you are being punched in the face – but it’s also a mental one, too, as much about landing blows to psych your opponent out and gently guide them around the ring – wrestling, contactlessly, for domination – as it is about moving your head quickly while someone is trying to punch it. Boxing at its best is physical, mental and spiritual, all at once, a complete union of the body and the mind, coming forward as one to deliver one final, striking blow.
This does not matter in the realm of Rocky because at no point has Rocky confronted the real-world reality that boxing is as much a mental art as it is a physical get-to. Rocky in Rocky wins fights by being spirited, and plucky, by being tough enough to get hit and then get up again, Rocky being a fighter of sheer endurance. At no point does Mickey take Rocky aside and say: stop getting punched in the head, Rock. And say: if you box a bit smarter, against Apollo Creed, maybe your brain and motor functions won’t be irrevocably damaged for the next 30+ years. Every single Rocky canon fight is about being hit – hard, hard, hard – for like 15 rounds, then in the last, dipping into some deep, previously unseen well of sheer will, and getting light on your toes, suddenly, even though both your eyes have been bruised shut, and just swinging, baby, and yes, yes, God and Jesus too: connect the punch, win the girl, spit out your blood and anoint yourself holy, you are the champion of the world. I am saying that if Rocky were a film about football then Rocky would be some sort of free-scoring 40-year-old phenomenon who somehow wins the World Cup without once consulting the tactics board. That if he were a cricketer his tactic would be to face a hundred deliveries then score some sort of astonishing multi-six on the last innings of the game. Rocky is a phenomenal boxer because he patently ignores arguably the most vital facet of the entire sport, and still becomes the champion of it. The moral of our story is: if you swing hard enough, you dumb idiot, you can achieve anything you dream of. The best Rocky movie is Rocky IV, but all the others are good too.*