Luciano Gonzalez
07/18/2020 - 8:00
- Clarín.com
- sports
"Do you think the United States is the land of opportunity? Apollo Creed believes it and will prove it to everyone, giving a stranger a shot at world title. That stranger is you. " The one who presents the offer is George Jergens, the promoter of the world champion, and the one who hears it is Rocky Balboa . The scene, part of the first film in the saga, could have other protagonists. The man in the suit could be the eccentric Don King . And the unknown boxer who was facing the chance of his life, Chuck Wepner, the man who served as the muse for building the most famous boxer character on the big screen and who ended up litigating Sylvester Stallone in court for the intangible value of that inspiration.
Like the Italian Stallion , Wepner was a local hero, but a stranger to the great ring, supplementing boxing with a rented job. He had been born in New York, but grew up in a municipal housing complex in Bayonne, New Jersey, across from the Big Apple port area . He had been a Marine and a porter for a strip club before putting on his gloves for the first time. After winning the Golden Gloves tournament in New York, he debuted as a professional in 1964, now 25 years old.
Chuck Wepner starred in 52 professional fights, of which he won 36, lost 14 and tied 2.
It never stood out as a rented boxer. In his early years, he alternated wins and losses on minor stages or as a preliminary at an important evening at Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile, he worked as a distributor of alcoholic beverages. On June 29, 1970, when he had already been knocked out by young and rising George Foreman , he had a chance to face the fearsome former world champion Sonny Liston at Armory, the training center for the New Jersey National Guard.
That night, with Muhammad Ali sitting in the front row, Wepner was severely punished and severely injured his eyelids, before referee Barney Felix stopped the contest in the ninth round. "They let me bleed for five rounds . Why wasn't I given the chance to win by knockout in the last one? ”Asked Wepner, unhappy with the decision of the referee and New Jersey Athletic Commission doctor Reginald Farrar.
That confrontation, the last in Liston's career before his mysterious death on December 30 of that year, left a few stains of blood stamped on the clothing of the occupants of the ring side . And he gave the loser 72 stitches on his face , a broken nose, another on his left cheekbone, and a nickname given to him by journalist Rosey Rosenberg and that would accompany him for the rest of his career: the Bayonne Bleeder .
Only a cinematic twist could tear Wepner out of that gray string of minor fighting and deep wounds. That turn came at the least expected moment: on January 7, 1975, 50 days after his 36th birthday, he found out through the back cover of the evening edition of the Jersey Journal that Ali, who three months earlier had recovered the belts by the World Boxing Association and the World Boxing Council by knocking out Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, would give him a great chance to become king of the heavyweights .
Chuck Wepner, his face bloodied, endures the onslaught of Sonny Liston, who beat him by TKO in the ninth round.
" I will not hit him once in the face. I'm going to win this fight lying on the ropes. He's going to throw punches until he can't take it anymore, he's going to get tired and then I'm going to hit him in the stomach, in the chest, but not a blow to the face. I do not want excuses for cuts, "warned the always provocative champion during the press conference to present the fight, on February 10, at the Plaza Hotel in New York.
"I am happy because the predictions will be highly unfavorable and I plan to bet on me," emboldened Wepner, who at the time had a modest record of 30 wins, 9 losses and 2 draws, but who had won his last eight fights (including one against former world champion Ernie Terrell ) after undergoing an operation to prevent the reopening of old wounds on his face.
This was the first and only time that he trained with full dedication, since he left his job at the beverage distributor for a couple of months, while Phyllis, his first wife, worked at night in the Bayonne post office. For that match, he would earn $ 100,000 , by far the highest bag in a career in which he had become accustomed to charging hundreds or a few thousand dollars for each performance. Instead, Ali would take 1,500,000.
The duel, for which the champion prepared himself quite lazily, generated much more criticism than expectations due to the opponent's level. A businessman, Don King faced questions and, with a certain mystical air, tried to sell the challenger almost as a reincarnation of Jack Dempsey . “It will be a fight that the entire nation will be proud of. Anything can happen when the time comes. People are known to transcend their earthly stature in the middle of the ring. We could have a miraculous event! ”He predicted.
The challenger was not happy with the forecasts that presented him as a steer heading to the slaughterhouse and he made it known in a note published in Sports Illustrated magazine , that on March 24, 1975, the day of the fight, he stamped on his cover a huge photo of his face (this time immaculate). “I was never beaten in my life. I don't know why people are so cruel. I worked to get to this fight. Ali wanted to face a target that was classified. Well, I'm in eighth place and I'm as white as you are, ”Mark Kram told journalist.
The great black monarch and the unknown white challenger, Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner (or Apollo Creed and Rocky Balboa?), Met face to face and before 14,847 spectators at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio, opened five months earlier. Before the start of the duel, James Brown sang the Hymn on the ring.
Then, the music was provided by Ali, who dominated the first eight rounds at will, although without accelerating enough to get a technically much inferior opponent out of the fight and who in the seventh episode suffered a cut in the left superciliary arch, which threatened with reissuing a well-known story from the Bayonne Bleeder career .
But in the ninth round the unexpected happened: with a right hand to the ribs and the help of a discreet stomp, Wepner became the fourth man to knock down Ali (the others had been Sonny Banks, Henry Cooper and Joe Frazier). "I went back to my corner and said, 'Warm up the car, we're going to the bank, we're millionaires . ' But my manager (Al Braverman) replied: 'You had better turn around because he is getting up and he seems furious,' ' ' he recalled in 2019 in an interview published in The New York Times.
Sure enough, Ali got up and woke up: ever since, he unloaded an arsenal on his adversary, who stoically endured the beating on his feet. In the 15th episode, exhausted and badly beaten, Wepner finally fell apart in a shower of punches . Referee Tony Pérez stopped the contest just 19 seconds from the final bell. "There is no other human being in the world who can make 15 rounds like this," the winner praised his rival.
Chuck Wepner's face, on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine, in March 1975.
That night, more than 3,000 kilometers from the Richfield Coliseum, an actor as little known as the Bayonne boxer saw the combat in a Los Angeles cinema. “I wanted to write something about how I was feeling, but my story was not very commercial. I went to see that fight and something clicked . I said, 'That's me, that's how I feel,' ”Stallone said in 1988, one of the many times he recognized Wepner's influence when creating the character that would make him a celebrity.
Muhammad Ali circumvents with a waist movement to the right of Chuck Wepner.
Exhausted and badly beaten by Muhammad Ali, Chuck Wepner falls apart on the ropes.
Rocky was released on November 21, 1976 in New York, on December 1 in Los Angeles and two days later in the rest of the country. The impact was immediate. On March 28, 1977, he won three Oscars : Best Picture (beating, among others, Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver ), Best Direction (John Avildsen) and Best Editing (Scott Conrad and Richard Halsey).
By then, Wepner had returned to liquor distribution and was going through the last, faded stretch of his career, to which he added a hint of circus performance. In June 1976, he faced professional wrestler André The Giant in a specialty duel at Shea Stadium in New York and before 32,897 spectators. In the third round , the Frenchman, huge as his name indicated (he was 2.24 meters tall and weighed around 250 kilos), threw the American out of the ring, who returned to the tapestry enraged. Then there was an invasion of the ring by the assistants of both fighters and everything ended in a lively tangana.
That same year, the former World Cup challenger also made two exhibitions, one at the Asbury Park Convention Hall and the other at a Freehold nightclub, against Victor, a celebrated 250-pound grizzly bear who had been trained for wrestling and used to appear on the Ed Sullivan TV show.
The bear Victor attacks Chuck Wepner in one of the two exhibitions that both starred in.
On September 26, 1978, at age 39, Wepner made his last professional appearance: He was defeated on points by Scott Frank in Totowa, 40 kilometers from his home. That night, as he walked from the locker room to the ring, a trumpet player performed “Gonna Fly Now,” the song by Bill Conti that accompanies Rocky Balboa during the ascent of the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and which became an Hymn. .
Seven months earlier, as if there were no doubts about the influence he had had on him, Stallone had invited the boxer to a test with the idea of having him play in Rocky 2 a coach named Chink Weber. "But I ruined the audition because I had been on the spree for two days," Wepner admitted. The character was removed from the script, but the name was used by Stallone for the inmate Sonny Landham played a decade later in Brutal Conviction .
After retirement, Wepner's life slid down a slope that led him in 1985 to be arrested with a good amount of cocaine in his possession and to be sentenced in March 1988 to a 10-year sentence for possession and distribution of narcotic drugs, of which he served less than three years in the Northern State Prison in Newark. At that time, he received a visit from Stallone, who was filming Brutal Conviction in that prison complex.
They met again in 1997, when Wepner approached Edgewood, 27 kilometers from Bayonne, where the actor was filming Copland alongside Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Ray Liotta. According to the former boxer, the treatment was cordial, but that day something ended up settling in his head. "I felt bad and I said to myself, 'I'm a real jerk, this guy used my name for 20 years to promote the Rocky franchise. I'm sick of it, '”he explained.
It took him six years to take the next step: In November 2003, he sued Stallone before the New Jersey Superior Court for $ 15 million for violations of what are known in the United States as advertising rights, protected in most of states of that country "on the basis of the general principles of recognition of the economic value of a person's identity and unjust enrichment," according to Ian Blackshaw, lawyer specializing in international sports law, academic and member of the Arbitration Tribunal of the Sport (TAS).
Chuck Wepner, along with Sylvester Stallone.
Anthony Mango, one of the attorneys who represented the plaintiff, detailed a number of very specific aspects of his client's life that would have served as a mirror for excerpts from the films. For example, he considered that the scene of Rocky's street training, which ends with the ascent of the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was copied from the routines of Wepner, who ended up going up the stairs of Bayonne's Stephen Gregg Park.
“I always had the idea for Rocky and although seeing Wepner was an inspirational moment, that doesn't mean Rocky is Chuck. It is unfortunate that he has come to this, but surely he had his reasons for doing it, ”Stallone said once the demand was known.
After nearly three years of litigation, attorneys for both parties informed the Court in August 2006 that they had reached a private settlement the amount of which was not disclosed . At that time, the Rocky saga included five films (the sixth, Rocky Balboa , was released on December 20 of that year) and had raised $ 1 billion. "I always loved the guy, he made me Rocky, but I needed him to recognize that I was the real Rocky," Wepner explained.
Chuck Wepner next to the statue sculpted by artist Zhen Wu.
That recognition that Stallone tweaked him ended up finding him later on the screen. In October 2011, as part of ESPN's 30 for 30 collection , the documentary The Real Rocky was released . "In my opinion, Sylvester Stallone kidnapped the soul of Chuck Wepner. This movie is my attempt to help Chuck regain his soul, ”explained Jeff Feuerzeig, the director, on the day of the preview at the Philadelphia Film Festival, just the city of Rocky. That production was followed by two documentary fictions: Chuck , released in September 2016 at the Venice International Festival, and The Brawler (2019).
Those were not the only compliments Wepner received, who at 81 and after overcoming rectal cancer, continues to live in Bayonne. At the initiative of businessman Bruce Dillin, a childhood friend, the Chinese artist Zhen Wu sculpted a two-and-a-half meter statue of the expugile, still lacking his bronze bath. When it does, it will be installed at the foot of the steps in Stephen Gregg Park.
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