True confessions:
That Rocky knocks me out

Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey

I believe my lifelong roller coaster of a crush on Sylvester Stallone began the first time I saw Rocky sometime in 1977. I was 13, and oh so very impressionable.
Shortly after seeing the movie, I hung a Rocky poster in my room — not the one of him triumphantly raising his arms on the Art Museum steps, or the one of him in the ring with that nasty Apollo Creed, because they were for boys. I had the one of him in his beat-up old A-shirt, one hand grabbing a pull-up bar, with his dreamy eyes and slightly crooked mouth intent on leaning in to kiss Adrian. Of course, in my world, he was leaning in to kiss me. Now that was a poster for the girls.
It didn’t matter that Rocky started his career as a "thumb-breaker" or that he lost his first bout with Apollo. What did matter to my young and untested heart was that he saw something in Adrian that no one else took the time to notice, not even herself. He looked beyond her ill-fitting glasses and the awkward woolen cap and her inability to ice skate, and he saw her heart. He pursued her, he cared for her. Most of all he protected her. And in the process she blossomed from an ungainly, insecure girl to a beautiful, confident woman who snared the man of her dreams.
It also gave hope to all us ungainly, insecure girls that if it could happen to Adrian it could happen to us. And so it was that I dutifully followed Sly’s career, eagerly anticipating Rocky II, vicariously enjoying the success that fame and fortune brought to the Balboas. Feeling happiness for Adrian as she came into her own with the birth of their son, whom Rocky affectionately referred to as "the kid." Maybe with all those hits to his head he just had trouble remembering "the kid’s" name.
But I couldn’t dwell too long on that. Next came Rocky III, and the overly antagonistic, overly annoying and overly bejeweled Mr. T, who had the scary name Clubber Lang. If that didn’t give Rocky enough to think about, there was the death of his beloved trainer, Mick, a.k.a. Burgess Meredith, a.k.a. the Penguin.
Mick’s death affected me on a much more profound level than most people because, unfortunately, my grandmother bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Meredith during her declining years. This does not bode well for me, I know. Every time we come across an old movie starring Burgess Meredith, my husband looks at the screen, looks at me, looks at the screen, looks back at me and just shakes his head.
But let’s just erase that visual from our minds and move on to Rocky IV. How I seethed with jealousy over the hoopla that surrounded this sequel. Of how Mr. Stallone was so enthralled with that 7-foot, ice-cold amazon Brigitte Nielsen, who played the love interest of the machine-like Ivan "I must break you" Drago, that he wooed and wed her in one fell swoop.
Not to mix facts with fantasy, but how could one man love a woman as pure as Talia Shire, only to become besotted with a woman whose intentions from the beginning were obvious to everyone except the intended target?
This was definitely a low point in my feelings for Sly. I was oh so disappointed in his momentary lapse of judgment. And to this day I wonder who got the last laugh, since Ms. Nielsen’s latest claim to fame was her offbeat romp with rapper Flavor Flav. But I hung in there for the premiere of Rocky V. And I saw the devastating effects of what loving the wrong woman can do to a man. Rocky V lacked heart, lacked passion, but most of all lacked the Rocky we know and love. Realizing what Brigitte can do to a man, let’s just hope that Mr. Flav’s music doesn’t suffer.
Which brings us to the recently released DVD of Rocky Balboa, the apparent last installment in the series. I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch the movie, what with my conflicting feelings for its star and all. But I felt it my duty to see this relationship through to the end. And Sly, my friend, you pulled through in the clutch.
Rocky is back — the heart, the passion, the original soundtrack. So is the dysfunctional yet touching relationship with the only other surviving member of all six Rocky films, Burt Young, who thankfully does not bear any resemblance to anyone in my family.
In an interview promoting the movie, Sylvester Stallone said he wanted to show that "the last thing to age is your heart." After seeing the movie, I’d have to agree. Under all those growth hormones and the Botox, we can still see Rocky’s heart, and it revives memories of a poster and a crush that now seem so long ago. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net