GOING THE DISTANCE

All Writers Are Rocky

By Michael James Moore

     The titles are part of our national language: "Raging Bull" and "Somebody Up There Likes Me"; and then there's "Cinderella Man" and "Million Dollar Baby."

     For many great American writers -- Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer, to name a handful -- the linkage between boxers and writers was a given. It's a link that confuses others.

     One simple way to comprehend all this is to ponder the evolution of the most famous boxing fiction of all time. That would be the first of the "Rocky" films, which was in the can but not yet released 33 years ago, at about this time of the year. Later in the fall of 1976, "Rocky" was a box office sensation. It won the Oscar for Best Picture in the spring of 1977. As for the writing . . .

     Long-story short: Sylvester Stallone was then a struggling actor who had a few minor credits and a bleak future. As fate would have it, he attended a 1975 non-title heavyweight bout between Muhammad Ali and a lumbering mediocre club fighter named Chuck Wepner. Amazingly and against all odds, Wepner the underdog went the distance -- he lasted all 15 rounds.

     Ding! Stallone hatched an idea that was brilliant in its thematic simplicity. He simply transferred all of his angst, all of his actor's frustration, all of his brooding I'm-30-and-gettin'-nowhere mojo into a screenplay that used boxing as a metaphor for life. The rest is history.

     In fact, Stallone truly made history at the Academy Awards in '77 as only the third person ever to be nominated in both the Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay categories.  But more important is that the script he wrote tapped into a universal theme -- a theme that all writers can identify with on any given day.

     In 1987 Joyce Carol Oates published a fascinating book-length essay called "On Boxing." In that slim illustrated volume, she added her provocative ideas to a notion that many (mostly male) writers had explored in decades past -- namely, that boxing and writing go together like . . . well, like hands in 16-ounce gloves.

     She wrote: "If a boxing match is a story, it is an always wayward story, one in which anything can happen. The boxers will bring to the fight everything that is themselves, and everything will be exposed -- including secrets about themselves they cannot fully realize."

     If that's not a prescription for a writer plunging into a new novel or revising a short story or constructing a play or a poem or a song, what is? And Oates adds this jab: "Every talent must unfold itself in fighting."

     Substitute the word "writing" for "fighting," and there it is.

     In some way or another, all writers are Rocky Balboa, as his character was evoked in the first film. That is, we are all (except for the very few who experience the breakout induced by mega-best-sellerdom) forever in training, often feeling too old to be contenders, and living on a diet of wishful thinking that yearns for that one-in-a-thousand shot at the title. But it can happen.

     Lightning strikes: In 1996, Madison-based novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard was the first author to be highlighted by Oprah when her Book Club was launched. More recently, a La Crosse-based writer named Danielle Trussoni found her debut memoir reviewed on Page 1 of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Those are the writerly equivalents of technical knockouts in the 15th round.

     In "The Aeneid," the poet Virgil summed it up like this: "The Trojans, all shouting together,/Roar their assent, and demand the promised reward for the hero."

     In the end, when Stallone's "Rocky Balboa" ended his saga, we saw yet another variation on that theme.

     Every writer who's alone at the keyboard, sparring with ideas, jabbing with words and phrases, striving to turn blank space into something of value . . . well, each writer who won't quit is the literary kin of Maggie Fitzgerald in "Million Dollar Baby."

     Her character personifies this astute remark by Joyce Carol Oates: "Boxing (is) America's tragic theater."

     Yet it's a line from the screenplay of "Million Dollar Baby" (a Paul Haggis script based on stories by F.X. Toole) that gets at the heart of this whole analogy.

     The line goes: "If there's magic in boxing, it's the magic of fighting battles beyond endurance . . . it's the magic of risking everything for a dream that nobody sees but you." And that's the way it is, for all serious writers too.