I watched about half of the national championship game. USC started pouring it on, some friends and I did some channel surfing, and on ESPN… there was greatness.

Muhammad Ali vs. Check Wepner in 1975. It was an amazing spectacle. Maybe some of you had seen it before, maybe you know what I’m talking about, but if you aren’t aware of Chuck Wepner… check it out. People talk about toughness among athletes all the time, but if you haven’t seen this Wepner/Ali fight, you haven’t seen tough. Not even close.

Chuck Wepner was about 6’5″, 240… and born to fight. Not box, but fight. To say his hair was thinning would be a bit of an understatement, but what was there was long, brown, sweaty, and flopping all over the head. He had a classic cheesy 70s mustache. His face looked to be made of well-worn pasty white burlap.

Ali was infinitely more skilled, in infinitely better shape, and ten times the boxer Wepner was. But rating them as pure fighters, you’d have to call it close to even.

The fight was classic Ali. He let the bigger guy whale away, blocking and dodging everything, rarely punching, but when he did, he snapped Wepner’s head with precision on nearly every punch. This went on for the entire fight.

Chuck Wepner’s face took a savage beating. For 45 minutes, Muhammad Ali tortured this man’s face. His eyes were cut. His face was swollen. What was a thoroughly ugly grill to begin with was made positively gruesome. Round after round, Muhammad Ali connected with his best shots. Wepner rarely connected with anything, but still swung wildly. All night long, nothing changed. You know how you watch a boxing movie and say to yourself, “All right, that’s ridiculous. No one could take that many shots like that to the face, and keep going.” Wepner did it.

We couldn’t take our eyes off it. At one point in the 13th or 14th round, Ali landed about three straight punches, all of them square, all of them hard, all over this guy’s face. He took it, and he raised his arms out to the side as if to say, “Bring more, baby. I am Chuck Wepner.”

For 44 minutes and 41 seconds, Muhammad Ali treated Chuck Wepner’s face like a punching bag, and Wepner took it. He didn’t go down, until there 19 seconds left in the fight. And even then, he got up.

Chuck Wepner was the toughest son of a bitch any of us had ever seen. We started speculating on what Check Wepner’s life was like outside the ring.

I guessed Chuck Wepner fought in bars just about every night of his life. There was probably no one in the world that Chuck Wepner would not destroy in a bar fight. He just looked like a bar fighter. If there had been an empty Budweiser bottle sitting on the turnbuckle, I have no doubt that Wepner would’ve picked it up and used it.

This man had to have taken so many beatings in his life to establish that kind of toughness. I just know that this man had been hit in the face with barstools, Louisville Sluggers, two by fours, pool cues, boards with rusty nails in them… anything. He could take it.

And his stamina was unbelievable. I bet to train, he ran about 30 miles every day, with someone running right next to him the entire way, punching him in the face as hard as he could. Every mile, it would alternate, and someone fresh would run next to him and punch him in the face. I can think of no other way to develop that kind of stamina and toughness.

Someone guessed that Wepner was the inspiration for Rocky. As it turns out… he was. We really had no idea of this fact, we just guessed it, and it was true. Stallone watched Wepner, grabbed a pencil, and wrote Rocky.

I also speculated that after the fight, he made a living by touring the country and betting people in bars that they couldn’t knock him down. They’d bet $50 on it, the guy would get to hit Wepner with anything he wanted, baseball bats, bricks, Chevrolets, whatever, and if Wepner didn’t go down, the guy paid up. I guessed that he also fought animals for money, and guess what… he did. After the Ali fight, Chuck Wepner fought a damn grizzly bear. Seriously.

He also unfortunately developed a mean coke habit, and couldn’t stop boozing and whoring. He should’ve gotten paid for the Rocky movies, but it didn’t work out for him. Given a choice between $70,000 up front, or a percentage of future proceeds from the movie, Chuck went with the $70 Gs. Good call. That decision only cost him about $7,930,000. Stallone actually wrote a part for him in Rocky II, but Wepner showed up drunk and with hoez in tow, and the scene never got in the movie. Wepner has recently sued Stallone for some Rocky proceeds.

Chuck Wepner joined the list of mjd’s all-time favorite athletes.