Rocky: Fantasy

ROCKY: PURE SCHMALTZ*

Once upon a time I watched boxing matches with my dad. It was back in the 1950s and early 1960s before my dad died in 1965 at the age of 75. I’ve written about this before, my life with my father, and posted my reflections at several sports and boxing sites on the internet. After watching some of the Rocky (1976) sports drama film and its five sequels: Rocky II, III, IV, V and Rocky Balboa and now in the evening of my life---with my father long gone---I pause with some nostalgia in my bones, my mental-set, for a man I hardly knew at the time.

My father was a member of the Baha’i Faith and had the first Baha’i funeral in May 1965 in the small town of Dundas at the centre of the Golden Horseshoe, a region in southern Ontario with a population now of over 8 million about 25% of Canada’s population.

I have been fully retired from FT, PT and casual-volunteer work for the last six years. I thank Sylvester Stallone for this visit to nostalgia-land--even if the visit was all pure schmaltz. -Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 29 March 2011.(*schmaltz is an excessive and overproduced sentimentality; it has synonyms like: goo, mush, corn, sludge and slush)

These films certainly made you famous,
Sylvester, as far back as ’76, when I, too,
was coming into my own at the University
of Ballarat…..No major star, me, of course,
but teaching at what is now a university in
this old gold-mining city in Australia was far
more than I ever could have dreamed about
back in my adolescent and young-adult life!!

A tribute to persistence, eh Sylvester, that’s
what Rocky showed(1) and the film grossed over
200 million on a budget of 1, the 7th highest of
the returns on investment ever made!....Rocky
Marciano was one of your inspirations and my
Dad and I enjoyed Marciano back in the fifties:

Italian-American boxer, heavyweight champion
of the world from 1952 to 1956 when he retired;
only heavyweight champion to finish his career
undefeated…….running up those steps became
a cultural icon for our times even tho’ it all had
a fairy-tale ring and strained credibility beyond
breaking point, but it was still Certified Fresh by
Rotten Tomatoes(2); & Rocky was voted second
best sports film by AFI(3) with the Library of Congress
selecting it as being: culturally, historically, aesthetically
significant…………Goodonyer, Rocky, Sylvester, and....
.....thanks for that nostalgia-land trip with my Dad.

1 Some critics argue the Rocky series, especially Rocky II, was a tribute to persistence and a type of redemption or deliverance without the traditional religious trappings.
2 Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films. It is most widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance.
3 AFI=the American Film Institute

Ron Price
29 March 2011