A run up the steps, and a run-in with Rocky

By Michael Vitez

Pete Rowe, from Strasburg, was in Philadelphia over the weekend with two college friends from California. On Saturday, they ate cheesesteaks, saw the sights, and finished with a run up the Rocky Steps.

At the top, as they celebrated the moment, a voice from behind them said, "You guys got up here pretty fast. You're making me look bad."

They turned around. It was Rocky himself, Sylvester Stallone.

"He was walking around with some of his family," according to Rick Rowe, Pete's father, who posted the item on Facebook, along with a picture the three college students took with Stallone atop the famous steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

"Yes, it was very fun both for Mr. Stallone and the surprised visitors," confirmed Michelle Bega, Stallone's publicist. "When he visits the steps ... he prefers not to make an event of it. Just be with the fans in a genuine and happily surprising way."

Stallone was in town to film what will be the seventh Rocky movie, titled Creed. Stallone, playing Rocky, takes on the role of his old trainer, Mickey, to train the son or grandson of Apollo Creed, Rocky's rival in the original movie and his friend in sequels.

The original movie, which won the Academy Award for best picture in 1976, will be 40 years old come November. The new movie, according to Rocky impersonator and fan Mike Kunda, will end at the Rocky Steps.

Stallone has always loved the steps. When he wrote the screenplay for the original movie, he conceived of the scene there. And in every subsequent movie, his character either runs the steps again or returns there. In Rocky IV, filmed in Russia, there are flashbacks to the steps. In the play Rocky last year on Broadway, the actor who plays Rocky runs up a set of steps.

In Rocky, Stallone wanted to run the steps with his dog, Butkus, but he was 120 pounds and not exactly athletic.

"After going up a flight and a half," Stallone wrote in the foreword to our book, Rocky Stories: Tales of Love, Hope, and Happiness at America's Most Famous Steps, "I realized I would only be completing this with a terminal case of a hernia, so I abandoned that idea."

Not entirely. In Rocky Balboa, the sixth movie, he runs the steps, at age 60, with his new dog, much smaller, and thrusts only one hand to the sky in celebration because the other is holding his pup.

It is hardly surprising that Stallone returns to the steps incognito. He loves it there.

For all his fame, wealth, and success, Stallone loves the idea that nearly 40 years later, people still come from all over the world and run these steps. The ritual is organic, authentic, and as we discovered in our book, the actor and movie may bring people to the steps, but they run to celebrate their own lives and accomplishments, or to get motivation for challenges ahead.

Stallone so loved our book, and this ritual, that he decided to end the movie Rocky Balboa with scores of Philadelphians running the steps and dancing at the top as the credits roll. As a gesture of kindness, he included my coauthor, Inquirer photographer Tom Gralish, and me. Tom has the camera and I have the notebook. Blink and you will miss us.

For the book, I asked Stallone why he thought people continue to run the steps many decades later. "Because we are underdogs," he wrote in the foreword. "And there's very few things, iconic situations, that are accessible. You know you can't borrow Superman's cape. You can't use the Jedi laser sword. But the steps are there. The steps are accessible. And standing up there, you kind of have a piece of the Rocky pie. You are part of what the whole myth is."

I submit that Sylvester Stallone is happy at the steps. He is proud of what he inspired here, that running the steps still resonates with so many. I believe he will continue to surprise people at the steps for as long as he lives.