“Ah come on, Adrian, it’s true. I was nobody. But that don’t matter either, you know? ’Cause I was thinkin’, it really don’t matter if I lose this fight. It really don’t matter if this guy opens my head, either. ’Cause all I wanna do is go the distance. Nobody’s ever gone the distance with Creed, and if I can go that distance, you see, and that bell rings and I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know for the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.” — “Rocky,” 1976
Opening Bell: Round 1
I begin out the back door. The sun is just coming up, and it has taken me forever to convince myself to leave my oh-so-comforting comforter and willingly embrace the chill of another winter morning. And yet, here I am. I walk past the fraternity houses and the sublets with months-old “call here for a lease” signs and into the real Ann Arbor neighborhoods — the ones with yards full of children’s toys and gardens versus pong tables and crushed beer cans. I take a deep breath, and then I am running. It hurts and it’s annoying and it’s wonderful, all at the same time. I have converted my body into an engine, pumping my legs and my arms to step, and step, and step and keep stepping until I have made it another block. It’s not exactly pleasant, but the push and pull of my muscles feels so existentially good that it doesn’t matter. As my breath turns short and labored, each heave of my chest is another affirmation that yes, I can do hard things. For just this moment, I feel powerful. I’m strong, I’m free and I’m alive. It is truly exquisite.
Round 2
One of the best things about “Rocky” is that despite Sylvester Stallone’s performance being universally acclaimed, Rocky’s charm does not come from his suave nature. It’s the exact opposite: Rocky is so un-smooth (rocky, one might say) that it’s almost impossible not to like him. He’s not especially intelligent. He can’t talk to girls. He’s dead broke. In that sense, he’s the truest version of the underdog we have ever seen put to screen.
Round 3
This is the day I run 11 miles. To some, that number is typical; to me, it is absurd. My goal — a half-marathon race coming up in four short weeks — is even more absurd. My body is not the kind that we typically associate with long-distance cardio. I am bigger, I have always been bigger and I probably always will be bigger than the average runner. And yet, I have decided to try to, just to prove to myself that I can. I am slow, but I love to run and the goal has gotten me out of the house more than I ever had before. Before class, after class, in the rain, in the heat, I drag myself out of the house with the same mantra — I’ve got legs. Why not run?
Round 4
There’s another key aspect that makes “Rocky” so special. The underdog sports film is a genre in and of itself, with a tried-and-true formula for feel-good success. Person/Team A, our hero(es), must go up against the formidable Person/Team B, well-seasoned and seemingly insurmountable. Team A might start out a little rough, but they eventually reach the pinnacle of their craft. Although it looks shaky until the final minutes, the underdog wins and the film ends on a soaring, climactic note. This is where “Rocky” deviates from the script: Rocky gets better as the film goes on, but hard as he tries to abandon his loser status, fate has other plans. He was never going to take down Creed (Carl Weathers, “Predator”).
Round 5
The next morning, I wake up and can’t walk. My left leg aches and every step feels like a bolt of metal driving itself up my calf. I wait a few days, figuring I’m just sore, then drive to urgent care when nothing improves. It’s a sprain, the doctor says. It needs rest or it will get worse, she says. I limp back to my car and, without even thinking about it, burst into tears in the parking lot. My body, the thing I have worked so hard to come to peace with, has rejected my goals. Maybe, I think, the doubts in the back of my head have been right after all: I simply am not the kind of person who can run a half marathon. All at once, I am 12 again, the starting gun has fired and I’m watching my sixth-grade cross-country teammates pass me by. Maybe it was stupid to try again.
Round 6
While I typically view art through a death of the author–like lens, I also uncritically deviate from my artistic philosophies the minute a piece of media has a good story behind its creation. The underdog status of “Rocky” the film mirrors Rocky the character so closely that it almost seems fictional. Stallone sold his dog to pay the bills while making the movie. The ice skating rink is empty because the production team couldn’t afford to film with people. Rocky’s iconic robe was too big by accident, and instead of wasting the money to buy a new one, Stallone wrote it into the movie. Another large obstacle to the movie’s production was Stallone, an unproven and practically unknown Hollywood player at the time and his insistence on writing and starring in the film. It was only by the grace of “Lords of Flatbush” co-star Henry Winkler, who had achieved breakthrough success as Arthur Fonzarelli on the popular sitcom “Happy Days,” that the script was presented to executives in the first place. Every step of the production seems like another path on the road to catastrophic failure. And yet, “Rocky” rose above its humble origins, becoming the highest-grossing movie of 1976 and winning Best Picture at the 49th Academy Awards.
Round 7
I wasn’t initially inclined to join cross country in middle school; I wasn’t fast or particularly active, and I knew the barrage of teasing I would have to endure as the biggest and slowest girl on the team. But I had run the gauntlet of childhood extra-curricular activities — soccer, ballet, softball — and quit every one, to my parents’ dismay. Knowing I was expected to do something active, I begrudgingly accepted their suggestion to join the team. In cross country, I reasoned, at least my season would be short and the sport’s individualistic focus meant I wouldn’t let down teammates when I failed. I could spend a few months phoning it in, then get on with my life.
But that didn’t happen. Instead of the begrudging tolerance I had been shown every other activity I tried, in track I found something different: an ally. My coach, who I’ll call Coach K, was a scruffy-looking math teacher only a few years out of college. In unbearable heat and snow, this man led his gaggle of 50 or so middle schoolers to jog to a park about a mile away for practice, running alongside us as we went. I figured that his efforts would be focused on the ten or so fastest kids, the ones who could potentially get us a trophy. But Coach K dropped back from the front of the pack, first to the middle, then back and back and back to me, usually significantly behind everyone else. There, we talked. He had this way about him: not an overly friendly, you’re-doing-so-great, patronizing tone or a harsh command to push me to get to the runner in front of me.
Coach K did something no adult had ever done concerning my athletic ability: take me seriously. He would note my performance over the past few days, ask me how my recovery after practice was going and sometimes give me a pointer or two on my form. He treated me like a real athlete, like someone with potential. This recognition of my potential led me to another realization: Yes, I was slow, but I also actually enjoyed running. Bit by bit, I began to really try during our practices, and my times started to improve. Even when I passed the finish lines long after everyone else at a meet, Coach K would be waiting for me, cheering me on and congratulating me on getting just a little bit faster. By the end of the year, I didn’t care that I was the slowest. I was proud of myself.
Round 8
Herein lies an ironic thing about “Rocky”: for a film so concerned with its main character’s fighting abilities, its bite centers around the near superhuman abilities of one entity if backed by overwhelming support. “Rocky,” at its core, is a two-pronged love story. The painfully shy Adrian (Talia Shire, “The Godfather”) is branded a loser by her abusive brother Paulie (Burt Young, “Back to School”), a designation so familiar to Rocky that it seems to inseparably bind the two together. In the same vein, Mickey (Burgess Meredith, “Of Mice and Men”), Rocky’s curmudgeonly trainer, never had a chance to reach the height of his own boxing career and invests in Rocky out of vicarious belief in his potential. These two are the reason that Rocky fights; without them, what’s the point of taking a beatdown?
Round 9
Eighth grade marked my last season of cross country. I’d seen the coach of the girl’s high school team at meets and carefully noted the way he disproportionately celebrated his top performers. I was fairly certain that I would be looked down upon because of my size. It posed an insurmountable barrier for me. Coach K had been an anomaly. So, like I had so many times before, I quit.
Round 10
In a modern context, until the last 12 minutes, “Rocky” is nothing more than a perfectly fine film. This changes as we enter the brutality of the final fight. In-story characters and out-of-story production alike all line up to this moment. Creed and Rocky take hit after hit after hit, bloodying each other’s faces; the film’s cartoonish overtones have been wiped away. Both fighters seem to hit the peak of exhaustion and yet refuse to go down. It’s almost painful to watch. The bell rings, and despite the uncertainty about who won, Rocky doesn’t care. He’s done all he can.
Round 11
I started running again in college. At first, it was only occasional jogs and 10-minute stints on the treadmill, but I eventually progressed to 5Ks and 10Ks, plodding along on pavement and dirt trails in Nichols Arboretum. With every additional mile I ran, I felt a strange mix of joy and melancholy. Sure, I had rediscovered a sport I really liked, but how much better would I be now if I had kept going in high school? Could I have gotten faster? Moved from hopeless to mediocre? Made varsity? Even won a race? These questions ate at me all the way through half-marathon training until my half-marathon destroying injury.
Round 12
I am not Rocky Balboa. I cannot take 15 rounds against Apollo Creed, and my audacity in comparing the two of us is probably inappropriate. Then again, I don’t know if any of us could stay standing against the heavyweight champion of the world. Director John G. Avildsen (The Karate Kid) has gone on record saying he “didn’t think of (Rocky) as a boxing movie any more than ‘Gone with the Wind’ was a Civil War movie.” Maybe Roger Ebert described it best: “Rocky” isn’t supposed to be a documentary. It’s a legend. A story to push us forward.
Round 13
I stayed off my leg for the better part of a month. Even after I could walk without pain, just a few minutes of shuffling attempts to run would bring it back with a vengeance. My race date came and went while I stayed inside, watching joggers out my window with envy. It was so hot that summer and I had no air conditioning, so almost all of my nonworking time was spent sweating on my bedroom floor, fan blowing directly at me, thinking. My leg wasn’t what hurt the most, I decided. It was my pride. It was the fact that I had told everyone — my friends, my family and especially myself — that I was going to do this big, impressive thing and then hadn’t been able to do it.
As my sprain healed, I contemplated whether I should give up on running altogether. I didn’t want to re-injure my leg, and the amount of time I had taken off meant I would likely be starting from square one, endurance-wise. What was the point of redoing all of the work I had put in?
But then I thought about the reason I returned to running in the first place — the fact that I could, and that I liked it. When I got my legs back, why not try again?
Round 14
Traditionally, quitting implies stopping before you have reached some kind of goal. But Rocky doesn’t win his final fight. Is that what we remember? Is it Rocky at the bottom of the 15th round, nose broken, bleeding and pummeled as the movie’s most iconic moment? Of course not. It’s that damn training montage with the song — you know the one — that we remember. He worked hard. If we do too, are we really quitters?
Final Round
It’s been a year and my leg has healed, but I still haven’t hit the 13.1-mile mark. That’s OK. I’m still running frequently, and it feels as good as it always has. Maybe I’ll conquer that half marathon someday, and maybe I won’t. It doesn’t really matter to me anymore; today, no race will make or break my sense of self-worth. It’s not about the amount of miles that I cover every time I break into a jog — it’s about the fact that I keep running, in any capacity that I can. It’s something that I love doing, and as long as I keep trying, I’m going the distance anyway.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.