I’ve always been a Rocky fan. If memory serves, I made my wife watch it (again) before the bar exam. And of course I’ve made my kids watch it. We named our bullmastiff ‘Rocky.’ Now, yes, yes… the later movies suffer, but so it goes. Few enough produce one thing that truly stands tall in the test of time, that I hardly expect anyone to do it again and again. And First Blood (Rambo) too is an excellent film about ‘the other’ (if also beginning as a pretty good book). So, two wins is enough to forgive anything else… even The Specialist.
(And for those needing a (disingenuous) legal hook, the Rocky franchise gave us an important copyright decision regarding the protection of fictional characters and non-protection of unauthorized derivative works, not to mention a business case study in contracting and film rights.)
So, I was excited to read The Steps, Stallone’s 2026 memoir on his life up to and including Rocky’s initial success. The failure for me of many a biography—autobiography or not—is way, way too much detail. I do not care what toothpaste anyone favored on the fourth of March, 1973, yet somehow too many authors seem to think I just might. Stallone avoids this mistake, keeping his text light, nimble, and blessedly short. And despite my somewhat following his person and career over the years, I (sigh) fell into the trap of thinking of his characters as him, rather than merely creations by him. I was thus surprised, for example—but should not have been—to find the youthful Stallone thinking often of a quote from Siddhartha.
In short, the memoir works because the story of the person who wrote such a great story—and Rocky is a great, timeless story—is the story of a smart, thoughtful person. And it’s good to know that these many years later, Stallone continues to realize it is of course not a movie about boxing. It’s a story about love.
Which makes it sad, then, that the love which supported Stallone through these critical Rocky 1 years, that of Sasha Czack, didn’t mutually stand the test of time—unlike that of Rocky and Adrian. But it’s wonderful to see her contributions to the script and film get credit in print, and it reminds me of these astute words of Robertson Davies (quoting a bit of Sir Walter Scott):
No love ever is the same as any other. The lucky ones get the big thing. You know—“The silver link, the silken tie”—but it’s not common. That’s one of the big mistakes, you know—that everybody loves in the same way and that everybody may have a great love. You might as well say that everybody can compose a great symphony. A lot of love is misery; bad weather punctuated by occasional flashes of sunlight.
– The Lyre of Orpheus
Quite right. As Craig Wiseman and Ed Hill wrote, (some) “ordinary people have extraordinary love,” and Rocky and Adrian are two of the very best. And the story of their genesis is just about as interesting as their own, making for a worthwhile read.
(Finally, for a second (disingenuous) legal hook, the memoir includes Houseman/Kingsfield of The Paper Chase.)
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