by Joel Golby
The Tao of Dog Piss
There is this incredibly physical feat I can pull off only when I’m playing pool, the green tabletop game beloved of steaming-drunk men and students, something I have variously been at certain points in my lifetime, and it is this: with the cue resting in the cleft between my folded thumb and forefinger, and my middle finger steadying the entire hand on the baize, I can flick and raise my ring finger to insane heights and angles while the rest of my hand remains still. It’s more of a physical tic than something I can control—there is this impulsive need in my ring finger to jolt until it finds a comfortable angle and settles, like that ache in your thumb you have developed recently when you wake up and need to check and scroll your phone—and the ring-finger-flicking routine is an integral part of my pool-shooting game: I am a reasonably good pool player, not a ringer exactly but a good obtuse-angle potter, and the jolting ring finger is a large part of that.
There are other sacred routines, too: normally I am playing pool in an extremely shitty northern pub, when I play it, where the table has been stained in places by two or three separate glasses of wine or pints of snakebite (normal pints of lager do not stain pool tables as bad, though they do get spilled on them with much more frequency), and that means the communal cues are often quite shitty and warped somehow and the whole table has a lean to it like a badly kept bowling alley, and the tip of the cue is mashed and compacted in myriad different places, and so to find the exact specific good striking part of the cue I will, while in shooting position, twizzle and rotate the cue until I find something I am marginally happy with but with no scientific or logical reasoning to how it is a better part of the cue to hit the ball with.
Or: there is a small internal gyroscope that must be quietly abated by putting weight evenly on one or both of my feet, and until I find that exact mercurial center—a moment or two, tilting forward and back—I cannot shoot with accuracy. Friends who have been privy to these three concurrent routines while playing me at pool have often been known to remark “Fucking hell” or, more exasperated now, “Fucking hell” in the ten to fifteen seconds it takes me every time I pot. But the point is: I pot, buddy. I pot and pot again. I pot and my whole body feels it, every singing atom of who I am.
Have you ever seen Cristiano Ronaldo take a free kick? It’s a glorious thing, and close to watching someone praying: he steps backwards three large steps from the ball, then one step to either the right or left, and then stands there, feet splayed wide apart, arms out rigid by his side, chest up and out like a retired army general marching downstairs for breakfast; then he breathes, three deep breaths in through the nose and out dramatically through the mouth; then he settles, for a moment, waits for the whistle, his ablutions complete; and then he runs on the spot two or three times before actually putting his glorious body in motion, and then pelts the ball fantastically hard, and Cristiano Ronaldo, 1; Opposition Team, 0.
Or: Have you ever swung a golf club, really, really swung it? It is all about routines and subroutines that only you can identify, a war of attrition between the logical clinical mechanic of the swing and the small feelings inside yourself when the weight is on your feet just right. Pulse each foot until it is in the right position. Wiggle yourself onto the exact balance you want. Look up, look down, look up again, then head down: and beat, and beat, inhale and swing. It has to feel right or it won’t go. You cannot swing a golf club without feeling.
Or: Have you ever seen a dog piss? Dogs piss like I play pool, or Cristiano Ronaldo hits a free kick, or you swing a golf club: they sniff the ground, dogs, tamp it with their paws, find the exact blades of grass they wish to anoint with their holy piss, then turn around in tight circles two, three times, then squat and let go. Or shit, they shit in a similar way, too. And what I am saying is this: sport is very primal, based on feeling and motion we cannot sense or see. In that way, it renders us like dogs, intricately pissing. We are never closer to animals than when we are swinging a golf club. We are little more than beasts when we hit a tennis serve just right. Thank you and amen.
Why Rocky IV Is the Greatest Ever Rocky Film and Therefore by Extension the Greatest Film in History: An Imaginary TED Talk*1
Me, aged ten: I consider the Rocky movies to be the most important movies in the entire universe.
Me, aged thirty: The ten-year-old was right.*2
The first time I saw Rocky, the first Rocky movie, was by sheer chance. I’d been trying to record some blood-gulch ’80s B-movie from late-night TV, and set the video recorder to the wrong channel, instead capturing the last twenty minutes of Match of the Day and the entirety of Rocky, and at first I watched it sort of waiting for gore: waiting for Rocky from Rocky to split open at the chest, for gray tentacles to shoot from his glistening torso, Adrian ravaged by hell beasts, spurts of blood getting all on Mickey. But something else happened instead: I fell instantly, irrevocably in love with Rocky Balboa. Rocky doesn’t even start quickly: it’s 122 minutes of a slow build to a high crescendo, and all those iconic scenes—punching the meat, sprinting up the steps, going fifteen rounds with the Champion! Of! The! World!—actually come in a fast volley at the end of the film, jab-jab, jab-jab, after an awful lot of slow-moving life stuff first. Rocky, the first Rocky film, is a lot about Rocky being poor and listless. Rocky taking Adrian ice-skating and completely fucking up his first-date banter. There are extended sequences in Rocky where he buys turtle food. Very little of Rocky is about Rocky getting hit really hard in the face, and quite a lot of it is about a cappella street gangs. What I am saying is it is a boxing movie with a heart, which is of very little appeal to a ten-year-old boy. And yet: Catch me shadowboxing and ducking my head down in the front room of my house. Catch my parents yelling up the stairs after bedtime as they listen to me thump on the floor, practicing my footwork.*3
As soon as I saw Rocky, I had to see Rocky II. The week after that, they played Rocky III. Rocky IV, the greatest geopolitical gesture of peace that will ever be seen in our lifetime, came after that. Then Rocky V, which we’ll skim over. Over and over again, until the tapes wound out. I have seen Mickey die a hundred times. I have seen Apollo Creed’s preternaturally cocky exhibition entrance a hundred more. At one of my first parties in London, when I was supposed to be meeting people and making friends and hey, why not, macking on girls, I noticed Rocky IV playing in the background, the red turned all the way up on the TV, and then sat there in silence and watched it: “Hey,” people whispered to me, nestling next to me with a beer, “this is a party? What are you doing?” And I would say: shut up. Rocky has just grown a beard and is about to run up a mountain. And then, when Drago is defeated and the whole Russian crowd rises to its feet, when I can change and you can change, after I shed a single tear, I stood up abruptly and walked out. There is no party that is better than watching Rocky IV.
What I am saying is: I am more primed than anyone alive to adjudge which of the Rocky movies in the Rocky movie canon is the greatest Rocky movie. And it is Rocky IV. I’m now going to spend a really long time explaining to you why.*4, *5
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Here’s Rocky’s tactic for every fight he has ever had: get hit in the head until the other guy gets either bored or exhausted of hitting him in the head, and then break that guy’s ribs, then win. There’s one fight where he doesn’t do this, and it is against Clubber Lang in Rocky III—Clubber, a real breathe-fire-and-shit-out-more-fire kind of guy, seriously capital-T terrifying to a ten-year-old me because of this particular primal scream he does when he is swinging, as if Mr. T was yelling the sound “auGH!” into a cavern that goes deep into the earth—so there is one fight when Rocky doesn’t do this, the head-head-head-head-ribs thing, and it only comes after Clubber absolutely decimates his head-head-head-head-ribs thing by overriding it with sheer head-head-head-head-head, plus punching his trainer, Mickey, to death prefight as some sort of exquisite flex, and then Rocky—redemption arc—Rocky h
as to retrain in the ways of his old foe Apollo Creed, who teaches him simple boxing methods like “moving your feet” and “slipping punches instead of taking them, fully, in the head,” and then he beats Clubber Lang on the rematch. But what I am saying, fundamentally, is Rocky has exactly one fighting technique, and there are seven entire movies about that technique: Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III, Rocky IV, Rocky V, Rocky Balboa, and, technically, Creed.
There are themes that run through the Rockys, is what I’m saying, if you look closely. Only when you know and understand the central tenets that prop up the idea of Rocky (and every film about him) can you begin to understand not only who he is, but all the versions of him along the way. Rocky came out in 1976, and was at that point the greatest movie ever made. Rocky II came out in 1979 and eclipsed it, then Rocky III (1982), an uninterrupted spell of Rocky one-upmanship that continued until 1990’s Rocky V, which sucked. Many Rocky scholars—myself, for a number of years, included—will not actually admit that V ever happened, stating instead the series skipped from Rocky IV (1984) to Rocky Balboa (2006), but to ignore the story of Rocky V—of Tommy “The Machine” Gunn, of Rocky slipping ever further into postfight delirium, of the most obvious father-son-son relationship of the whole franchise—is to ignore a number of central themes of the series, writ so large they glow like the Hollywood sign, and drives us further from establishing what a Rocky movie truly is. I have watched Rocky V three entire times in my life, which I believe is more than anyone in history has ever managed to endure, including the editor of Rocky V. There is no greater authority on this shoddy, shoddy mess of a film than me. It is, against everything, a Rocky movie.
So here’s what qualifies a Rocky movie as a Rocky movie. From there we can figure out which is the best one of them all, and establish that it is IV:
Rocky has to get punched in the head and not die. Rocky getting punched in the head and not dying is basically all III and IV are about, and a lot of II, and quite a lot of act 3 of I, and V as well (although V opens with a shot of Rocky in a hot shower in Soviet Russia, panting and begging for Adrian as blood tips out of his ears, so pummeled by the robotic Ivan Drago that he truly does flirt with death, for a while there, but then miraculously he recovers enough to take Tommy “The Machine” Gunn on in a no-gloves street fight, where he gets punched directly in the head a ton of times, like really hard, and doesn’t at all die). In Rocky Balboa Rocky gets punched in the head, absurdly (he is fifty-five years old!), and does not die. In Creed he does not get punched in the head, but he does nearly die. What have we learned about that? A pretty strong theory is that Rocky needs to be punched in the head a lot to live. Anyway: unless Rocky gets clanged in the head so hard his kids can feel it, it’s not—I’m afraid—a Rocky movie.
Ideally Rocky trains insanely for the fight he is about to have. In Rocky, Rocky is so poor he has to train with the tools he has available to him—he has to chug raw eggs, and run up art-gallery steps, and punch beef ribs, and not fuck his girlfriend because his legs would get ruined. (A running theme throughout the films is that women ruin legs, and if you’ve ever tried to go to the bathroom after having sex with one, you will definitely know this. Rocky, a devout Catholic, is an oddly sexless man, especially given that, in Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone was in such good shape he was essentially a walking erection, just muscles on top of other muscles, and Talia Shire opposite him was a full and bodacious ’80s babe. I have never wanted to watch two people fuck more, and yet I can’t actually imagine them fucking. This should have been a footnote, not parentheses.)*6 In Rocky II he has to learn to catch a chicken with his bare hands, and that somehow makes him fast enough to beat Apollo Creed, who is a simulation of Ali in his prime, i.e., utterly unbeatable unless you are a chicken catcher, I guess. In III he gets too far into professional training methods—prizefight training in public in a town hall, with marching bands and photo opportunities—and gets his arsehole kicked in, which is why he has to go and train in Miami doing swimming and shuttle swims up the beach. In IV, with the Soviet Union bearing down on him, he chops logs and sprints through snow so fast Russian spies tailing him in a car spin out and crash, and he chugs up a mountain and says “YEAH!” at the top. In V Rocky never really trains so it doesn’t count. In Balboa, with calcium deposits on his joints and ruined knees, he can’t run or spar much, so instead he focuses on building blunt-trauma force, which he does by lifting weights and hitting old tires with a hammer. It’s hard to imagine what kind of boxer Rocky would have been if he just went to, like, a normal gym.
Rocky has to have grim motivation. In Rocky, all he wants to do is prove to the world that he isn’t a bum (in the Rockyverse, “bum” is the absolute worst insult you can level at someone, and the worst thing you could be: Rocky is tired of hearing it and tired of being it): his only motivation is himself. In II, Rocky can’t train because Adrian is in a birth-induced coma, until she wakes up from the coma and says—first word, out of a coma—“Win!” so he trains really hard and wins. In III Mickey is dead and he wants to avenge him. In IV Apollo is dead and he wants to avenge him. (The lingering specter of death is a running theme in everything Rocky ever does. He basically doesn’t do anything unless someone just died about it. Imagine trying to get the man to put the bins out.) In V he is basically only fighting because Tommy goaded him into it outside a pub (canonically, Rocky has only been in a pub twice in his life, once in I and then again twenty-four years later in V). In Balboa he is fighting because Adrian is dead and he is—well, not wanting to avenge her, exactly, but mainly because he is bored. Rocky never goes into a fight just to have a fight. There has to be something more significant on the line.
Ideally at some point a doctor has to very bluntly tell Rocky that if he ever gets punched in the head he will die, and Rocky will say “I gotta take that chance, Doc.” Over the course of the series Rocky has been: declared blind in one eye (II); told he has irreversible brain damage and that the next punch will kill him (V); actively denied a boxing license because he is too old and broken (Balboa). In II Adrian doesn’t want him boxing again and then in IV she’s the one who urges him to fight. In V he is told an overly enthusiastic nod will kill his brain, and later in the film he goes three rounds with the newly crowned world champ, then sixteen years later goes ten rounds against the pound-for-pound world champion, and still only loses on a split decision, and doesn’t even die in the ring once: Rocky has been living in a state of potential brain death for a decade and a half. In III (1982) Rocky first attempts to retire, a feat he does not successfully achieve until Balboa’s 2006. In Creed he is diagnosed with cancer, and I still wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to get up and start swinging until the credits were rolling. The only rightful way for the Creed trilogy to end is with young Adonis Creed fighting against his old mentor in the ring, and it goes ten rounds and a judges’ split, and the judges inexplicably give the belt back to a seventy-two-year-old Rocky, who screams “ADRIAN!” once, then dies. Until Sylvester Stallone himself expires, I won’t truly admit that Rocky is retired, and even then they can do holograms of 2Pac now, so. Rocky can never retire.
A crowd that was previously very against Rocky starts chanting his name (I, II, IV), or a crowd that was indifferent to him starts chanting his name out of respect (Balboa), or a crowd that was on his side to start with watches him win, then chants his name (III). Someone’s name has to get chanted, all right? It’s the rules.
It’s good but not essential that a woman realizes she loves a man when she sees ten shades of shit get kicked out of him in the ring. This is the denouement of Rocky (“ADRIAN!”), and a theme in the shot-for-shot remake Creed, but there are other moments, too: the wicked redhead in V only gets horny for Tommy Gunn when she watches him win a title; Apollo Creed’s wife only becomes a main character the moment she slo-mo screams “NO!!!!” in the seconds before he convulses and dies; Drago’s wife, Ludmilla, only really admires her husband when he’s robotically punching
men until they die. A woman’s love, the Rocky movies tell us, is a hard-won and actually quite dark and nasty thing. It’s not actually a good advertisement for it.
For some reason a running theme in the films is “extremely close family members of the boxer absolutely cannot be bothered to attend the fight he’s in and so watch it from home,” which honestly seems rude to me.
There has to be a distorted version of the father-son relationship—this is crucial. Rocky does not visibly have any parents, ever—he doesn’t call them or invite them to his fight in Rocky, so it is assumed they are dead, and he never talks about them to anyone, so it’s unclear what the fuck is going on there. In that space he finds surrogates: either Rocky finds a father figure in the vacant hole where he’s left without one (Rocky with Mickey); loses his father figure and goes mad with grief (III); ignores the kid he actually has (IV, V); tries to reach out to the kid he’s ignored for decades (Balboa) and finds him to be a bit of a dickhead so just takes on another adopted kid instead (also Balboa); or takes on another adopted son in a very begrudging but ultimately fulfilling way (Creed). This can also go with animals: over the course of the movies Rocky loves two dogs, two turtles, zero cows; as well as one woman, one false father and two false sons, and sort of, maybe, one actual son. His one true love? My friends: it is the noble art of boxing.