Gonzo: Stallone stole Wepner's Rocky story

Sylvester Stallone could have saved himself a lot of time. If the actor was going to borrow Chuck Wepners story, he should have fully committed himself to the heist and used real footage. Its better than anything that appears in the fictionalized remake.

Scenes in The Real Rockya documentary by Jeff Feuerzeig thats showing in the on-going Philadelphia Film Festivalcome fast and hard, with grainy black and white photos and old, washed-out color films working like combination punches designed to stagger the audience. And they dobecause the audience has seen it all before, or at least the Hollywood rendition.

The film is about Wepner, the Bayonne Bleeder, a heavyweight boxer from New Jersey who fought the champ and went the distance, a man whose life didnt just inspire Stallone to write Rocky and its many sequelsit ended up doubling as a treasure map for Stallone. All he had to do was follow Wepners experiences to the end point: hundreds of millions of dollars and stardom. The Real Rocky does a wonderful job explaining how it all unfolded, how Wepner went from nobody to somebody to the guy who ended up suing Stallone for gobbling up his life and then regurgitating it to the hungry masses.

In 1975, Wepner was ranked eighth in the world. He was at home watching his favorite show, Kojak, when the phone rang. It was his mother. There was a story in the paper about the champ, Muhammed Ali, giving some white guy a shot. Some white guy named Wepner.

Wepner had no idea. Years earlier he fought Sonny Liston and lost, got his face mashed up pretty good. At that point Wepner was best known as a guy who could take a punchprobably too many. Sound familiar?

Like Rocky, he was a journeyman. Like Rocky, his shot was unexpected. Like Rocky, he was supposed to be a bit player in a bigger production designed to grow Alis legend even larger.

Dont knock the white guy, said Don King, who promoted and dreamt up the fight. He deserves a break, too.

If you didnt know better, if the timeline was reversed, you would think the Ali-Wepner pre-fight press conference was a reenactment of the one between Creed and Balboa. There was Ali, mouthy and entertaining as usual. And there was Wepner, by his side, a willing and largely silent participant in the spectacle.

"I want to make an announcement, Ali said. Chuck Wepner bleeds. He bleeds. He bleeds. So I make another announcement: There will be no shots landed in his face. I will not land one head shot. I will win this fight by laying on the ropes. He'll get tired, he'll punch himself to death and then I'm gonna hit him in his stomach, hit him in the sides, in the chest.

For emphasis, Ali turned to Wepner and pantomimed punching him in the head, tapping Wepners noggin lightly while saying not one punch will land here. I don't want no excuses. Wepner never moved. He just stood there in his leisure suita chestnut-colored shirt, which matched his Fu Manchu mustache, with a huge butterfly collar that flapped over onto a khaki jacketand blinked at the champ.

The newspapers said Wepner had no chance. The filmmakers selected a few of the comments for emphasis. Among the pre-fight jabs Wepner absorbed in print: Hes swallowed more blood than Dracula; His face resembles an old boxing glove; He has enough stitches in his face for a couple of double-knit suits.

Cut to spectacular footage of Wepner training for the fight: Doing road work, jumping rope, shadow boxing. He didnt hit a side of helpless beef in a meat freezer, but that was the only scene missing. Wepner said he felt like he was in the best shape of his life for that fight. And Ali? Like Creed, he wasnt taking the bout too seriously.

I can beat this man if Im in halfway shape, Ali said in one of the many interviews that sounded like it came from Rocky instead of real life.

Wepner took another beating in that fight. Round after round, he charged ahead at Ali. Round after round, and especially after the seventh, he absorbed serious punishment. Still, Wepner didnt go down -- not until the very end, not until there were just 19 seconds left in the 15th and final round. The fight was called and Wepner went home with a tenderized face that included two swollen eyes.

It should have been his toughest fight. It wasnt. Thats what the documentary is really about: 30 years of Stallone getting rich off Wepner while the boxer worked as a liquor salesman.

When Rocky won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976, Ali was there. He was on stage with Stallone.

I saw it, Ali said to Stallone and the world. You stole my script. All that was me. I'm the Apollo Creed.

It was supposed to be a joke.

The film details all the other parts of Wepners life that Stallone appropriated. At the end of his workouts, Wepner used to run the steps at Hudson County Park; Rocky ran the Art Museum. The script for Rocky II had a fighter named Chink Weber in it, and Wepner read for the part; the character and his lines were cut before the movie was made. At the height of his post-Ali celebrity, Wepner wrestledfought Andre the Giant in a crazy circus-style promotion. Toward the end, the Giant picked up Wepner and tossed him over the top rope and into the crowd. In Rocky III, Balboa faces a mammoth professional wrestler named Thunder Lipsplayed by Hulk Hoganin the same sort of absurd spectacle. Sure enough, Thunder Lips picks up Balboa and throws him over the top rope.

And on it went for Wepner. After his career ended, Wepner developed a bad coke habit and later went to prison for possession and distribution. Stallone visited himwhile he was shooting Lock Up at Northern State Prison in Newark, N.J. the same place where Wepner was doing time.

Wepner didnt sue Stallone until decades laterlong after Stallone had gotten rich and Wepner hadnt. In 2006, while Stallone was busy telling everyone that Wepner was most certainly not Rocky Balboa, the two settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

If youre not convinced, if you think Wepner, who lives in New Jersey with his third wife, is just some battered old punching bag who wanted to make a quick buck, The Real Rocky will change your mind. Toward the end of the documentary, there is an interview with Stallone from the late 80s. It serves as a brutal gut shot that sucks all the wind out of the argument that Wepner isnt Balboa.

I was really spiraling downward fast, Stallone said about his life in the 70s. I wanted to write something about the way I felt. But I knew my story wasn't commercial, wasn't translatable in many languages. As fate would have it, I went to a boxing match that night and I saw Muhammed Ali and Chuck Wepner. Something just popped. I said, That's it. That's me. The Bayonne Bleeder. Chuck Wepner.

E-mail John Gonzalez at jgonzalez@comcastsportsnet.com