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Home > What's New > Rocky Balboa: An Elegy for Cigars and Heavyweight Champs
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Rocky Balboa: An Elegy for Cigars and Heavyweight Champs
Posted: Monday, January 08, 2007
By Bruce Goldman and Greg Mottola
Rocky Balboa is still the underdog in his sixth and (presumably) final installment.
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Many filmgoers forget that when they first met Rocky Balboa in 1976, he was the likeable leg breaker collecting loan-sharking debts on the loading docks of Philly, smoking cigarettes and fighting dirty in church-basement club fights. The Rocky franchise grew so fast that the inspirational story line overshadowed the main character's somewhat sketchy past. All was forgiven and forgotten after he proved himself to be a hard-working, hard-hitting brawler with enough heart and determination to attain the greatest title in the world on a million-to-one long shot.
Even when he became a champion, the movie sequels managed to frame him as an underdog in some way or another. Rocky Balboa, the sixth and (presumably) final installment in the saga, is no exception. The movie opens with scene after scene of Rocky moping around the streets of Philadelphia, mourning his late wife, Adrian, dragging brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) with him, and capping off his day by tending to his Italian restaurant decorated with old fight photos, circulating among patrons, telling old boxing stories -- a walking, talking piece of boxing memorabilia himself.
At the same time, the current champion, Mason "The Line" Dixon (Antonio Tarver), is an unchallenged, uninspired, over-pampered king of a lackluster heavyweight division. Cut to an ESPN debate in which boxing analysts concoct a computer-simulated matchup between Dixon and Balboa (in his prime), much like The Super Fight pitting a retired Rocky Marciano against an inactive Muhammad Ali back in 1970. In the movie, the computer-generated Balboa knocks out the computer-generated Dixon.
With Dixon's popularity and profit margins waning, his promoters cook up an idea: have Balboa and Dixon fight for real. Never mind that Balboa's pushing 60; never mind that he was diagnosed with brain damage in Rocky V and would never in a million appeals get himself licensed by any commission; never mind that something like this would be a lose/lose situation for everyone -- it'll make money. The proposition is made and Rocky decides the fight's on.
While it was admittedly very fun for us to go back to Rocky land, we have to ask ourselves: is this kind of comeback believable? The knee-jerk reaction is, of course, to say no, but there are a few things to consider. Rocky was a hard hitter with a good jaw. In the world of boxing, those two attributes stay with a fighter long after speed, coordination and stamina are gone. These two traits alone can keep a fighter in the game when most of his speedier, technically superior contemporaries have hung up the gloves, so there's one point for Rocky Balboa's plausibility -- but how long can Rocky stay competitive?
Some real-life boxers have proven that hard hitting could compensate for age-related deficiencies. George Foreman came out of retirement to win some great victories against Gerry Cooney (a second-round KO in 1990) and Jimmy Ellis (a third-round TKO in 1991) before regaining the title by knocking out Michael Moorer in 1994. Foreman was 45 years old. He stuck around long enough to mix it up with Evander Holyfield and eventually retired after losing a controversial decision to Shannon Briggs in 1997. After subsequently losing to Lennox Lewis, Briggs stated, "Big George hit harder." Even Holyfield, now 44, refuses to retire. He's fought twice since August, winning both bouts, and has every intention of regaining the heavyweight championship belt (or at least one of them) before he officially retires. Incidentally, the New York State Athletic Commission will not license Holyfield to fight in New York.
Sylvester Stallone from the April 1998 issue of Cigar Aficionado magazine.
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Given these examples, there's little doubt that Rocky Balboa could've realistically retained his punching power over the decades. But consider this: other hard-hitting champions tried to make comebacks with disastrous results. Recall Earnie Shavers, who is billed as one of the hardest punchers, if not the hardest puncher, in heavyweight history. After retiring in 1983, he made a comeback and lost terribly in 1995 to a no-name who wouldn't have lasted more than one round with him back in his prime. Shavers was 50 at the time of the fight. And even Mike Tyson, for that matter, lost to a ridiculously underskilled Kevin McBride in June 2005. Had that been 1988, McBride would not have been beaten, but massacred in 30 seconds.
Famed boxing writer A. J. Leibling wrote, "A fighter knows when he is slowing up because he cannot reach the openings he sees. This intimation is confirmed when fellows who have no right -- that is, no professional qualifications -- to hit him do. In fact, they murder him." Tyson and Shavers were Liebling's text-book examples of an aging fighter. So things could've realistically gone this way for Balboa as well. The way we interpret it, boxing history says Balboa's comeback is possible though unlikely, and this is good enough for us.
Besides the boxing segments in Rocky Balboa, a number of scenes have cigars, which got us thinking about the movie in a whole different way. Boxing and cigars have gone together for at least as long as people have been photographing the sport. But despite all the black-and-white vintage stills of smoky cigar clubs and stogie-chomping managers, very few venues are left, if any, where one can smoke a cigar and watch a fight. Certainly no high-profile ones, or at least none that we know of. When was the last time you saw Don King smoking a ringside cigar? Even boxing's Beelzebub has to follow the rules.
Back when the original Rocky premiered, smoking wasn't the condemned pariah it is in today's society. Philadelphia, the setting for much of the Rocky movies, was as cigar-friendly as any other American city, perhaps more so, and even as late as last summer, while sister metropolises continued to jump on the no-smoking bandwagon, the City of Brotherly Love had remained a haven for smokers. But, inevitably, a smoking ban was finally implemented last September, prohibiting smoking in restaurants and most bars. So when Rocky Balboa opened in theaters on December 20, cigar smoking was dead in Philadelphia.
Or was it?
Thanks to a nearly monthlong reprieve, courtesy of a change in the effective date of the smoking ban after Mayor John Street signed a revised bill, lighting up in eateries and taverns was legal again in the city at the time of the film's premiere. The ban goes back into effect today, but for the short holiday period, moviegoers could actually watch the aging Rocky's courageous comeback and then go out and celebrate in style with a stogie.
Rocky brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) manages a ringside smoke.
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Although the idea of a cigar at a boxing match is becoming as much of a relic as Rocky himself, and, dare we say, as archaic as the idea of a real heavyweight champion, we were glad to see that cigars still have a prominent place in Rocky Balboa. Bert Randolph Sugar, another legendary boxing writer, is seen chomping on an unlit cigar during a meeting of the minds on ESPN. And Paulie invariably has an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth, whether he's hovering over Rocky's corner during the big fight scene at Mandalay Bay, pacing the frigid corridors of the meat-packing plant or bursting into Adrian's -- Rocky's Philadelphia restaurant -- in a drunken rage. In this respect, the movie keeps with reality -- the familiar cigar prop is dutifully shown, though literally extinguished by current social mores.
Like many cigar aficionados, Paulie reaches for one for celebration, for consolation, for self-pity and, yes, even for contemplation (at one point, he comes to the realization that he could have treated his late sister better). It doesn't matter that his smoke of choice is unlikely to be a Montecristo No. 2 or a Fuente Fuente OpusX; what's important is that he is able to partake in a pleasurable diversion that helps make life's challenges a little bit easier to deal with. In a sense, although assuredly without knowing it, Paulie is standing up for every smoker's right to enjoy a legal product in peace. Sure, Young's character may not be the most upright citizen, but he still represents the reasonable desire of man to be free from unreasonable governmental constraints on his liberties.
Just for the record and for the Rocky fans out there, all of Rocky's previous foes would've destroyed Mason Dixon. Apollo Creed would've dropped him in three, Clubber Lang would've beaten him like a dog, and Ivan Drago would've broken him. Even Spider Rico would've given him some anxious moments. In Rocky's prime, there's no question who would've won that fight, but a mediocre champ against an aged and beloved titan? It's sentimental notions like this that keep boxing promoters and movie producers rich, even if they have to go outside to smoke their cigars.
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