30 Years later, another true life Rocky story
If you are 30 years old or younger, you do not remember a time when the national and international and local image of the city of Philadelphia did not include the cinematic-branded memory of Rocky Balboa running up the steps of the Art Museum. You don't remember the days before a fictional boxer transformed Philadelphia's self image of itself from a snake-bit Palookaville, where nothing goes right, to a Camelot where anything is possible, where a past-his-prime club fighter from South Philly/Kensington, proved to the city and the world that he weren't just another bum from the neighborhood. You don't remember a Philadelphia without hipsters and $500,000 row houses.
If you were born in 1976 or later, you don't remember a time before Rocky without roman numerals. And you certainly don't remember Vince Papale recklessly hurling his body at National Football League behemoths on kickoff and punt return special teams during his three seasons with the Eagles from 1976 to 1978. In fact, only five of the current 92 players in the Eagles roster were born before 1976. And it's hard to feel what you can't remember. So let me tell you as one who was there, it felt great. For those of us who lived through those earlier darker times in the city and the sports teams we loved, the emergence in the same year of Sylvester Stallone from Lincoln High School, Northeast Philadelphia, and Vince Papale from Glenolden, Delaware County, was a bit of casting magic by the gods who have the power to merge truth with make believe. And for those of us who remember the hurtful longing of a unappreciated city, this week's world premier of "Invincable," the Vince Papale story starring Mark Wahlberg, may as well be called "Invindication."
You see in 1976, Philadelphia had every right to feel proud of itself, but we -- especially young adult Philadelphians -- were still climbing out from under the lingering self-image of a well-intentioned billboard slogan years earlier that said, "Philadelphia Isn't as Bad as Philadelphians Say It Is." We knew how good Philadelphia was, but we didn't believe the world knew. Or even that each other truly believed. And on the year of the Bicentennial celebration, Hollywood magic sprinkled its stardust on our town in a gritty grim love story about a guy who wanted to go the distance and then shout, "Yo, Adrian! . . .I love you too." It was, in a word, bee-you-dee-ful.
However the Wahlberg/Papale movie is received by the public, whether it's a commercial hit or not, whether it is historically "accurate" or not (unlike in the movie trailers, Eagles fans didn't start the "E-A-G-L-E-S. . . EAGLES!" chant until decades after Papale played), the movie is bound to strike that same Rocky chord in the heart of America. A regular guy with modest physical skills and inconquereable determination who gave it his best shot and triumphed. What's not to love about a movie like that? Even if Mark Wahlberg looks about as much like Vince Papale as Sean Astin (who played Samwise in the Lord of the Rings) looked like Rudy Ruettiger in the Notre Dame football walk-on movie "Rudy." The real Eye-talian Stallion, Vince Papale, has dark eyebrows that look like quotation marks on a billboard. But then Hollywood is about make believe, even if, in its own weird way, it makes us beleive what we've already seen with our own eyes.
