In His Own Words
What was Rocky the man like? By all accounts, he was a gentle, kind man out of the ring, mindful of other people's feelings. He wasn't a boaster or braggart, and he didn't think himself surperior to others in any way. It's been said he was a simple, honest man, and that was true. He was also a well read man of high intelligence, not at all like the image of so many fighters of old. In May, 1955, Collier's magazine ran, in Rocky's own words, what it was like to be champion of the world.
At about eight thirty on the morning of September 24, 1952, I woke up in a hotel room in Philadelphia. You know how it is when you wake up in a strange place, and at first you don’t know where you are? "Something nice happened to me," I thought to myself, and then I remembered. "That’s right. Last night I won the heavyweight championship of the world."
I’ve had the title now for almost three years. In that time I’ve found out that in some ways it’s everything you think it’s going to be, and in other ways it’s very different.
I remembered the night in 1933 when Primo Carnera won the title from Jack Sharkey. I was eight years old at the time, and in the Italian section of Brockton they had big bonfires burning and they sang and shouted around them almost all night long. I could remember those fires in the James Edgar playground right across the street from our house, and I figured: Gee, if I could win the title, I’d come back to Brockton and I’d throw a big party for the whole town and every kid would be invited and get an expensive gift.
When you’re the heavyweight champion the money, of course, is the big thing you’re going for, because that’s why you became a fighter in the first place. Before I started fighting, the most I ever made was $1.25 an hour as a manual laborer. When I retire, if I’m lucky, I should never have to worry about money again, but it isn’t as much as you expect it to be, and your security is still a problem.
Last year, for example, I fought Charles twice. At the end of the year, after expenses and taxes, I came out with a lot less then $100,000. When I fight twice in a year I don’t figure, with taxes, to net more than about $15,000 out of the second fight, and that’s not a lot when you’ve got only four or five more years of fighting and when, each time you go into the ring, you’re risking the heavyweight championship of the world.
I’m not complaining, because I couldn’t make that kind of money doing any other thing, and when you come from a poor family you know it’s a privilege to pay taxes. It’s just that you feel that other people don’t understand.
I’ll never, you see, be able to afford that big party for all the kids in Brockton. That’s not important, just kind of a foolish dream, but the important thing is that you can’t do all you want for charities and churches and just good people, and you have a feeling that they go away not liking you because of it.
When I get together with my old friends in Brockton it isn’t the same, either. They never start a conversation. They answer my questions quickly, and I never do find out how they feel and what they’re thinking, and we never have the laughs about the little things we used to have before. They no sooner get out to our house than they’re starting for the door, because they’re afraid they’re bothering me, and I try to tell them they’re not.
That’s what it’s like to be heavyweight champion, when you look at one side. But you have to give up something for everything you get, I guess.
Outside or your own family, you can make the title mean so much for other people. One of my greatest pleasures is meeting some nice little guy, like my kind of people, and, when I can make it, going into his town with him. This a real honest, hard-working quiet little guy that nobody ever paid much attention to, and he takes me around and introduces me to everybody and this makes him important where he works and lives.
Take what it has meant to my pop. He’s sixty-one years old now, and came to this country in 1917. He was gassed in World War I, fighting with the Second Marines at Chateau-Thierry, and he was never really well after that. For over 30 years he worked in the shoe shops in Brockton at a machine called a number 7 bed-laster, which is one of the tough ones. Four years ago I could see to it that he retired.
My mom was telling me that, when I was a kid, day after day would go by when Pop wouldn’t say a word.
Once I made a speech at a dinner in Boston of the big shoe manufacturers. Everybody who spoke was telling jokes, and I’m not good at that, so I thought I’d try to make a point in a light way.
I told them that, if I was a good fighter, I thought they should take some of the credit for it. I said my pop worked in the shoe shops for thirty years and I used to carry his lunch to him and I saw how tough it was. I told them that sometimes I saw his pay and I saw how little he got. I said, "He used to tell me; ‘I want you to stay out of the shoe shops.’ So, to keep away from them, I became a fighter instead, and therefore I think you men had a part in making me a fighter."
I don’t know if I got it across. I just thought it was worth a try.
The influence you have, that you can use for good without being a crusader, goes so far beyond what you think that sometimes it frightens you. You might, without realizing it, say a wrong thing. (In Manila, during a Pacific tour) ... when we went to the leper colony we were a little nervous, because we didn’t know what it would be like. There was a woman who explained that we couldn’t contract the disease, and she told us how the poor people in the colony never see anyone important and have so little to look forward to.
There were, maybe, 1200 people in the place, and when we got there they just moved back to make a path for us without anyone saying anything to them, and it was one of the saddest things I ever saw. I went up on stage and they asked if they could see my muscles and how I train, so I took off my shirt and I shadow-boxed a couple of rounds.
Then we started out. Again they pulled away, to make that path, and they began to call to me.
"God bless you, Rocky," they were calling. "God bless you. May you reign long."
If you think being heavyweight champion of the world is all happiness you’re wrong. In Los Angeles, before we went to the Pacific, we visited the iron-lung patients in a hospital called Rancho Los Amigos, and maybe it was there more than any other place that I realized what being champion of the world means.
We went to the men’s polio ward first and there was one kid lying there who knew everything about me, and we’d catch each other’s eyes in his mirror while we talked. There was another guy who’d been a basketball player for Loyola, and when I looked in his mirror to talk with him I saw he had my picture pasted on it. They say I had guts in the Walcott fight, but this kid was telling me how he’d lick it and play basketball again.
After that we went to the women’s ward, where there were a lot of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids, and the nurse told us that all that day they’d had all the nurses busy primping them up because I was coming. With us was a friend of mine, Ernie Clivio, and when we got out we just looked at each other and I thought we might both cry.
When I was training for LaStarza, Walcott came up to see me work in the hangar where I train at the Grossinger airfield. After the photographers had finished posing us, Joe and I got to talking, with nobody listening, over behind the bags.
"Joe," I said, "how’s the motel going out there in Jersey?"
"Fine," he said, "Very good."
"I hope you make a lot of money with it," I said.
"Rock," he said, "I want to say this. I liked that title. I didn’t want to lose it to anybody, but if I had to lose it, I’m glad I lost it to you. You’re a good fighter and you’re gonna be a great champ."
"I appreciate that, Joe," I said, "and I think you’re a great guy."
That was a real warm thing, and why not? Walcott fought his greatest fight against me, and I fought my greatest against him. This is something people are going to talk about for the rest of our lives, and we can be proud of it. It took two of us to do this together. One can’t do it alone.
"But don’t you think somebody might lick you?" I get asked. "Don’t you ever worry about it?"
I don’t want to seem like I’m bragging, but I don’t think anybody in the world can lick me. I’ve never been defeated in 47 fights as a pro, and right now I hope maybe I can hold the title, if I’m lucky, four or five more years and retire undefeated. At the same time, once in a while, maybe seven or eight times when I’m building up to a fight, the thought comes to me on the road or while I’m resting: "Suppose this guy licks me? What will happen to all my plans?" That’s as far as it gets. I never believe it can happen, really. It’s just one of the things that come to your mind.
I can remember, though, the night that Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott fought for the first time and Walcott had Louis down twice but didn’t get the decision. I had had one pro fight 10 months before and I was sitting on the bed at home listening to the fight.
It never occurred to me that I would be the guy to knock out Louis and retire him and then knock out Walcott and take the heavyweight championship of the world. Now that I’m champion I wonder, once in a while, if there is some other kid nobody ever heard of sitting someplace and listening to one of my fights, or watching it on television, who might, in a few years, do the same thing to me.
I'm heavyweight champion of the world, but is there some young fighter somewhere who wants it as much as I did?
Out on the West Coast there’s this big, young heavyweight named Charlie Powell. He put together a lot of knockouts last year, and they were touting him as a real good prospect. That night last fall when he fought Charley Norkus I watched on television, and when the fight got under way I could see that he was a big guy and boxed nice and could punch. "You know," I thought to myself, "this might be the guy."
