Sylvester Stallone’s memoir ‘The Steps’: How a 1975 heavyweight bout sparked the creation of ‘Rocky’

The year is 1975. The setting: a boxing ring.

In one corner stands Muhammad Ali, the reigning heavyweight champion. In the other is Chuck Wepner, a journeyman fighter with an awkward, ungainly physique and an extraordinary capacity to absorb punishment. Wepner's propensity to bleed in the ring has earned him the nickname 'The Bayonne Bleeder'.

Against Ali, few expect him to last long.

Thousands watch from the arena, while countless others follow the fight on television and in theatres. Among them is Sylvester Stallone, a struggling young actor who, not long before, had appeared in a pornographic film to pay his bills. He is something of a Wepner himself—an underdog in the Hollywood ring, fighting odds to survive.

“Wepner looked like a heavy bag with eyeballs, and the fight looked really sad,” Stallone would recall years later. “Then, all of a sudden, something incredible happened.”

In the ninth round, Wepner lands a blow that sends Ali sprawling to the canvas—only the fourth knockdown in the champion's professional career. Ali is stung by the indignity. He retaliates with a vengeance, battering Wepner mercilessly through the subsequent rounds. The Bleeder bleeds, but his spirit remains unbroken. Somehow, he survives to the fifteenth and final round, before Ali is finally able to stop him.

In Wepner's iron-willed defiance, Stallone glimpses the makings of a gritty underdog story. Returning home, he plunges into a a feverish burst of inspiration, writing almost nonstop for three days. The result is the first draft of Rocky.

The film becomes the biggest box-office hit of 1976 and wins three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For Stallone, Rocky becomes a triumph almost as improbable as the chances of him knocking Ali down.

Half a century later, Stallone revisits that extraordinary journey in The Steps, a memoir whose title evokes the enduring image of Rocky Balboa raising his arms in triumph after racing up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The memoir follows a similar ascent. Divided into sections of metaphorical steps, the book takes Stallone from a troubled childhood and the mean streets of New York to the eventual breakthrough in Hollywood.

Written in a disarmingly candid voice, the book is enriched by sketches and photographs from Stallone's personal collection. His gift for vivid prose is evident in his recollections of childhood. A botched forceps delivery left him with partial facial paralysis and a distinctive slur that would later become his trademark. His family lived in a cramped New York “cold-water flat” without hot water, where a sheet of plywood laid across the bathtub doubled as the kitchen table. His parents, each wrestling with personal demons, were locked in a tempestuous, often violent relationship. “The cold water flat,” he writes, “became its own unheated battlefield.”

Wry humour frequently illuminates the dark passages. Even during his leanest years, Stallone refused to let poverty rob him of his sense of style. With winter approaching and barely $35 in his pocket, he once bought a battered Afghan army coat, its lambskin lining worn thin and its back bearing the inscription “1922”. An accompanying photograph shows a young Stallone, looking every inch the star he had yet to become.

His sense of style, however, was not always matched by political awareness. Stallone writes that, after buying the Afghan coat, he splurged another $9.50 on a bright, form-fitting shirt adorned with a large gold star on the front. Wearing it beneath his Afghan coat, he strutted through New York feeling like a superhero. Then came a torrent of obscenities from some construction workers nearby. Bewildered, he came to discover that he had been parading around in a shirt bearing the Viet Cong flag.

“Americans were dying by the thousands over in Vietnam,” he writes. “I was ignorant to most of it... utterly unaware of what was going on in the world outside of a twenty-block radius of the Sutton Hotel.”

Returning home, he pulled off the Viet Cong shirt and dumped it into an alley. Years later, he would fight the Viet Cong as John Rambo—the other iconic character in his filmography.

New York was also where Stallone received the advice that propelled him to Hollywood. During a filming break, a drunken fellow actor berated him for being too eager to please. “Drive your own fuckin' cab!” he shouted. Life, he said, was like a taxi ride: one could either let others dictate the destination or take the wheel and chart one's own course.

Stallone writes that he soon set off for Los Angeles in a battered car, with his girlfriend Sasha beside him and little more than a few possessions. Somewhere in Texas, the car broke down, leaving them stranded in the wilderness. Salvation, he writes, eventually arrived in the form of two donkeys, led by a man in a sombrero. They hauled the vehicle to a ramshackle garage.

One of the memoir's principal weaknesses is its failure to place Stallone's westward journey within a larger historical context. He arrived in Los Angeles during an era of radical change in American cinema. In New York and other east-coast cities, independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese were challenging Hollywood conventions, while actors such as Al Pacino and Robert De Niro were helping bridge the worlds of New York theatre, independent cinema and Los Angeles-centric mainstream filmmaking. Stallone's own passage westward—tracing the steps many filmmakers would take before and after him—could have provided a fascinating window into this creative ferment. But the book's preoccupation with personal triumphs and tribulations leaves the wider cultural landscape around Stallone's career largely unexplored.

But for all its omissions and indulgences, The Steps is rarely dull. There are delicious accounts of bruised egos and clashing personalities, and some genuine insights into filmmaking craft. The book ends on a swelling note of nostalgia and triumph, with Philadelphia providing the setting for its concluding section, titled 'The Final Step'.

That title, however, may not be apt. The distinction of being Stallone's final step could belong to Tulsa, Oklahoma—a little farther north of the place in Texas where his Hollywood journey almost came to a halt. With Tulsa King—the popular television series set in that city—Stallone, 80, has been enjoying a remarkable late-career renaissance. In the series, he plays Dwight “The General” Manfredi, an exiled New York mafia boss who sets about building a criminal empire of his own by recruiting local misfits.

Blending gritty drama with dark humour, Tulsa King is now in its fourth season. It has been dominating streaming charts not only in the US but also in parts of Europe and Asia. Its creator, Taylor Sheridan, has emerged as an influential figure in television's rediscovery of Middle America, producing groundbreaking dramas such as Yellowstone and Landman that resonate with audiences often overlooked by Hollywood's coastal establishment.

“That audience was ignored for centuries.... since John Wayne,” Stallone said recently. “They are always writing about California and New York. But Middle America—it's a different vibe."

Decades after the migration of talent from New York to Los Angeles helped reshape American cinema, Stallone once again finds himself at the centre of Hollywood's changing cultural landscape—this time with Tulsa King. Alongside Yellowstone and Landman, the series has come to embody, for some right-wing observers, a stiff challenge to the left's hold on American popular culture.

The political symbolism of Tulsa King is also sharpened by its corporate connections: the series is produced by Paramount, now controlled by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder and prominent Donald Trump supporter Larry Ellison. In November 2024, shortly after Trump was re-elected president, Stallone sparked controversy with his speech at a Mar-a-Lago gathering. He introduced the president-elect as “the second George Washington”.

The backlash at the time was exponentially more than what the Viet Cong shirt had earned him in New York. “I'd heard about the war and the protests,” Stallone writes in the shirt chapter in The Steps, “but my sense of politics was almost nonexistent.”

Few autobiographies leave readers wondering what their subjects might do next. The Steps, however, achieves precisely that. With Paramount having commissioned the fifth season of Tulsa King, now being filmed in New York, Stallone finds himself back in the city where his journey started. He seems very much in the driver's seat of his own cab—even if the passengers in the back determine the general direction of the journey.

His next turns, and next steps, should not be missed.

THE STEPS

Author: Sylvester Stallone

Published by Seven Dials

Price Rs899; pages 293