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Catching Up With . . .
Chuck Wepner, heavyweight boxer
March 24, 1975
Posted: Tue May 5, 1998
Having
recently
taken
the heavyweight title back, from George Foreman in the epic
Rumble in the
Jungle, Muhammad Ali was feeling charitable. So for his next title
defense, in March 1975, he picked as his opponent a
36-year-old club fighter who moonlighted as a liquor
salesman. Chuck Wepner, a
6'5", 225-pound
ex-Marine from New Jersey, had a chin of rock, but his face ripped
apart like rice paper. Hence his nickname: the Bayonne
Bleeder.
This was the Great White
Hope? "That's the only hope he's
got," Ali said.
Wepner was further dismissed as a pretender in SI's
prefight cover feature. But in the ninth round he became
just the fourth man to knock Ali down, with a right to the
chest. "It wasn't that great a punch, but he went
under the ropes and almost went out
of the
ring," Wepner, 59, says. "He wouldn't have made it back in by
10, and I would have been the champ." In the 15th
round an exhausted Ali sent an equally spent
Wepner to one knee, and referee Tony Perez stopped the fight a
mere 19 seconds from the
final bell. Said Ali, "There's not another human being
in the world that can go 15 rounds like
that."
Wepner's courage soon became the stuff of Hollywood.
Inspired by Wepner, Sylvester Stallone created
Rocky, which would win the Oscar in 1976 and spawn four sequels.
Though he served as a consultant on the movie, Wepner
thought it would flop.
"I took a one-time payment of $70,000 instead of one percent
of the
gross," he says. "Had
I taken the percentage,
with all five movies,
I would have made
millions."
He had nine more fights
(plus an exhibition
"match" against pro wrestler Andre the Giant at Shea Stadium)
before retiring in 1978. Seven years later he was arrested
for possession of cocaine. Wepner was given a 10-year
sentence in March '88 and served three years in Newark's
Northern State Prison before being released. He has been
married to his third wife,
Linda, since September '94 and does public relations work
for a pharmaceutical and a packaging business in addition
to giving motivational speeches. "I've been clean now
for more than 12
years," says Wepner. "I'm very lucky. I have my health, and
though
I was never a champ, I'm treated like one."
—by Paul
Gutierrez
photographs by Neil Leifer (cover)
Issue date: May 11, 1998
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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