Jeff webber la soul festival11/4/2023 ![]() The Bayonne Bleeder hadn't quite gone the distance. There were just 19 seconds left on the clock. At the count of six, with Wepner attempting to rise, referee Tony Perez waved off the fight. A right hand under the heart sent the champ to the canvas, and though Ali's tumble was probably aided by the presence of Wepner's foot on top of his, it went into the books as an official knockdown.Īnd it unofficially ended any prayer Wepner had of winning the fight.Īn angry Ali battered Wepner mercilessly for the next six rounds until, finally, late in Round 15, he floored the exhausted challenger with a combination. In the ninth, the tenor changed suddenly from "this is surprisingly competitive" to "holy $#%&!" when Wepner became only the third man to knock down Ali. Although most of the world rooted for the aging underdog Ali, Wepner was pulling for Foreman and assumed his title shot had disappeared when Ali went on to famously Rope-A-Dope his way to an eighth-round knockout.Īs it turned out, King was just as eager to put the Great White No-Hoper in with Ali as he had been to match him with Foreman, and on March 24, 1975, Wepner's life was forever altered.įor eight rounds against an undertrained Ali, 40-to-1 underdog Wepner pressed the action and was very much in the fight. What made this run of success in his mid-30s possible? "Believe it or not," Wepner said with a laugh, "I learned to duck a little more."Īfter the Hinke win, promoter Don King promised Wepner the next shot at heavyweight champ George Foreman, after Big George was done pummeling Ali in Zaire. He won his next two, lost one, and then embarked on the best streak of his career, winning eight straight - including a win over Ernie Terrell, two over Randy Neumann and a knockout of Terry Hinke. The Bayonne Bleeder lost both of his next two fights on cuts. But after he recovered, he decided to make one more run at heavyweight glory. He was in dire shape for two days, with his wife and mother constantly icing him down to keep his temperature under control. I grazed the referee with a left hook the next round, and the commissioner jumped up on the ring apron and waved the fight over."Īfter that defeat, Wepner seriously contemplated retiring from the ring. "I told him, 'I'm all right, Barney, let me go another round.' But I couldn't see Liston. I said, 'How many guesses do I get?'" Wepner said. "Barney Felix, the referee that night, came into my corner and asked me how many fingers he had up. The conclusion of the Liston fight offers a classic example of his storytelling prowess: According to Wepner, it was Bayonne Times sports editor Jerry "Rosey" Rosenberg, sitting ringside in a tan leisure suit that became increasingly polka-dotted red as the fight wore on, who bestowed upon him his degrading yet eternally charming handle that night.Īs splashy as Wepner turned Rosenberg's jacket, Wepner himself is every bit as colorful in the role of a raconteur. He pressed the fight against Liston and paid for it with a broken nose (one of 11 he suffered in his career), a cracked left cheekbone and 72 stitches (among a total of 338 in Wepner's 15 years in the prize ring). At 6-foot-5½, Wepner might have done better in the win-loss column if he had been inclined to fight from the outside, Klitschko-style, but that just wasn't how he operated. Wepner acquired that nickname on June 29, 1970, when as a 31-year-old journeyman heavyweight with a record of 20-5-2, he took on former champ Sonny Liston in Jersey City. "This film is my attempt to help Chuck get his soul back."īefore Bayonne, N.J.'s Chuck Wepner cemented his enduring legacy with the one-two combination of a 15-round fight against Muhammad Ali and a six-movie series triggered by that bout, his reputation was defined by three words: "The Bayonne Bleeder." "In my opinion, Sylvester Stallone hijacked Chuck Wepner's soul," Feuerzeig said. The director of the documentary, Jeff Feuerzeig, calls Philly "the scene of the crime." The location for the screening, some two miles from the art museum steps that Rocky Balboa famously scaled, is not accidental. ![]() Wepner sits in the back row next to his wife, Linda, watching the finished product for the first time. "The Real Rocky" is a made-for-television documentary, but a few nights before its premiere on ESPN, it finds its way to the big screen as part of the Philadelphia Film Festival. Finally, 35 years after he inspired a billion-dollar cinematic franchise, Chuck Wepner is a movie star. You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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