I floored Muhammad Ali, inspired Rocky movies before prison and Sylvester Stallone lawsuit

One observer of the fight in 1975 between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner was so moved by the latter's performance that when he left the closed-circuit television viewing at a Los Angeles cinema he went home to write a screenplay.

Wepner was stopped that night at the Richfield Coliseum in Ohio with 19 seconds remaining of the 15th and final round, having, in the ninth, knocked the reigning and greatest of all world heavyweight champions down. 

That same observer hadn’t yet succeeded with his previous screenplays, but in what was described as a 'frenzied three-and-a-half-day flurry of creativity', wrote another about an Italian-American fighter based in Philadelphia. This time Sylvester Stallone’s screenplay was adapted, and he played the lead role in what was to become the highest grossing film of 1976, the winner of three Oscars in 1977, and ultimately the project that changed his life. 

“I couldn’t even get cast as an Italian,” Stallone once said of his career before he played the role of Rocky Balboa in Rocky. “I said, ‘If there is one movie I can definitely get into, it would be The Godfather because there’s a party scene and there’s three hundred guests’. They said ‘No’.”

Wepner was in 2022 honoured with a statue in Bayonne, New Jersey, which became his home when his parents separated when he was a year old. Raised in the projects close to Collins Park, where mixed a blend of dockers, oil refinery workers and mobsters, like so many of his contemporaries he first started to fight on the streets. 

“Where I grew up, there were always two or three gangs,” he once said. “And, more or less you had to go up there and beat up the toughest guy to survive, which I did. I’d have a fight almost every week.”

When he was born, in New York on February 26, 1939, the world heavyweight title was widely regarded as the richest prize in sport, contributing to Wepner, a promising basketball player for his high school team, committing himself to boxing. He spent three years with the marines when, at 15 and therefore under age, he convinced his mother to sign the necessary paperwork to allow him to illegally enrol.

Aged 18 and weighing 220lbs he then entered the New York Golden Gloves, and won the title in 1964 – the same year he made his professional debut back in Bayonne, where he stopped his fellow debutant George Cooper in three. 

For all of his toughness and his progress, in the years before he challenged Ali, Wepner lost when he fought the elite. In 1969 he was stopped by the heavy-handed George Foreman in three rounds, and when fighting Sonny Liston – like Foreman widely recognised among the most powerful punchers in history – less than a year later he was retired by the ringside doctor after nine because of the cuts across his face.

He was regardless on a run of eight successive victories when he was matched with Ali, in “The Greatest’s” first fight since dethroning the then-champion Foreman in 1974’s The Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire. 

“It was the only time I had a proper training camp, where I could take time off my day job – me being a liquor salesman,” Wepner recalled, in 2015. “Before in my career, I had to work all day then train at night, doing my roadwork very early in the morning. But [the fight promoter] Don King, he sent me to New York and I had seven weeks of training. I felt great and I’m positive that long camp made all the difference. I was in great, great shape.”

The night before the biggest fight of his life, Wepner was invited by the owner of the Coliseum to join he and Ali for dinner. The two opponents sat side by side, and Wepner, like so many who came before him and also those who would later meet Ali, was ultimately charmed.

Wepner, the significant underdog, was widely expected to be convincingly beaten, and yet on fight night many of the 15,000 present started to support him, apparently won over by their belief that they were watching him over-perform. 

In the ninth round – Ali had five months earlier stopped Foreman in eight – Wepner slipped a jab to land a body shot that sent Ali backwards and then to the canvas. Ali’s team argued that their fighter had been tripped by Wepner, but Wepner maintains that he had not.

“I remember exactly what I was thinking,” he said in 2015. “I said to my manager, Al Braverman, ‘Start the car, we’re going to the bank, we’re millionaires’. Al said, ‘He’s getting up and he looks pissed off!’ I said, ‘Oh, oh!’.  Me and Al, we always had lots of fun.”

Ali, already leading, responded by intensifying his efforts to hurt 'the Bayonne Bleeder' – a nickname Wepner was given because he was so regularly cut. Bleeding heavily in the 15th round and destined for defeat, the referee Tony Perez, much to the crowd’s disappointment, intervened to rescue him from further punishment. He wasn’t to know it in that moment, but his performance had changed the course of his life.

Don King, keen to capitalise, organised for him to fight, in a staged contest in 1976, the wrestler Andre Rene Roussimoff, known more commonly as 'Andre the Giant'. Wepner lost after one minute and 15 seconds of the third round, when Roussimoff threw him from the ring and he was counted out.

Wepner complemented his income from boxing as a bar-to-bar salesman for Allied Liquor, and by chasing money for people he knew who had given others loans. After his retirement in 1979 his increasing interest in partying and cocaine contributed to him failing an audition to appear in Rocky II, and in 1985 he was convicted of possessing narcotics and sentenced to 10 years at Newark’s Northern State Prison, before being released on parole after three.

Previously uncredited for inspiring the Rocky franchise, Wepner later started a lawsuit against Stallone. It was settled in 2006 for an undisclosed amount, leading to, in 2016, the release of Chuck, the film about his remarkable life.