The Champ's Final Bow by Prospero E. Pulma Jr.

The Champ's Final Bow

It is easy to understand why Rocky Balboa ensnares viewers in a time warp. The sixth and final installment of the fictional boxing icon's life hits people not with a coma-inducing blow to the cranium but with a soft jab to the heart. The film weeps with Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) as he laments the loss of his beloved Adrian (Talia Shire), his estrangement with his son, Robert (Milo Ventimiglia),the disintegration of his umbilical cord to a past that radiates with unforgettable memories.
But before the movie gets mawkish, a stimulating wallop, in the form of a computer simulation that pits Rocky in his prime and the current and controversial champion, Mason “The Line” Dixon (real-life boxer Antonio Tarver), is delivered. The flashier Dixon initially pummels the Italian Stallion but he recovers and sends the present titleholder to dreamland. The programmed match ignites a wildfire of interest. Dixon's handlers see it as an opportunity to settle the legitimacy of their ward, who is undefeated against the patsies thrown at him but untested against old-school warriors like Rocky. Balboa takes it as his chance to prove that age never robs a person of his dream to fight one last time before he hangs everything. He wins over the skeptics-his son, Paulie(Burt Young), his best buddy turned brother-in-law, and boxing officials-and starts training for the exhibition bout.
Nostalgia is served in large doses as Rocky sprints on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Bill Conti's Gonna Fly Now starts to play before the film reverts to the present, where an over-the-fill Rocky faces a formidable and younger foe. In the ring, Dixon literally treats him with kid gloves at first, but Rocky employs his team's blunt force trauma tactic that convinces Dixon that he is fated to be baptized by fire that day. The exhibition game turns into a bloody brawl and ends with both camps claiming victory. Rocky gets to bellow his last hurrah while Dixon gets bloodied by a real ring warrior.
Rocky Balboa fails to knock out when it means to and sweeps people off their feet when it does not intend to. Rocky's big words ring less louder than his mourning for his beloved Adrian. His grief exposes his human nature more than his bombast about handling the rotten eggs that the world throws at everyone. And you have to pity Dixon, for he is like a pretender to his throne, a king with no crown.
An old man once lamented the lost age when sports champions walked the earth, the days before megabucks deals and intense publicity elevated sports heroes to the status of demigods, the days before profit and press releases substituted for sterling achievements in the sports arena. In Rocky Balboa, we become that old man who want to see champions in the mold of Rocky and not clones of Dixon, to have a champion we can call our own.

-Prospero E. Pulma Jr.