Fighting Talk How Sly turned bad behaviour into big box office

Sylvester Stallone has been partial to boxing since he was at school.

It’s a passion that brought him two Oscar nominations, as scriptwriter and star of Rocky, a film which set him on the road to stardom and his status as one of the biggest action movie heroes.

But the incident that instigated his interest in the noble art wasn’t something looked on kindly by his careers officer or anyone else at the Catholic school in Philadelphia which he attended.

Sylvester was excluded 14 times for disruptive behaviour before being expelled altogether. It was then he decided to become an actor. With the satisfied smile of a man who knows the story has a happy ending, Sylvester recounted the initial incident when I met up with him at the Dorchester Hotel in London last week.

“I was in school and there was this bully who was coming after me,” he remembered. “I got into a fight with him and I just danced around him and peppered him with punches and I thought, ‘Wow, I like this’.

“Then I became the school bully for a bit until someone bigger came along and beat me up. But that original fight was almost an epiphany in terms of becoming interested in boxing so I started to study the sport and got more involved.”

The now affable actor (he puts the behavioural issues of his youth down to suffering ADHD) is talking pugilism because of his latest film, Grudge Match, which plays heavily on his Rocky persona.

It’s a comedy about a boxer enticed out of retirement by an old rival to settle the score after fights in the early 1980s ended with the boxers having won one each.

In the opposite corner is Robert De Niro, whose reputation among the fighting fraternity is on a par with Sly’s after his outstanding performance as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull.

“I thought I put Rocky to rest after the last film,” said Sly, who played his famous character for a sixth time in the well-regarded 2006 movie Rocky Balboa.

“I was happy with it and I thought that would be it for me in the ring. But then Robert said let’s do this film and I thought it would be a skit on what we did in the ’70s and ’80s but Robert kept calling and breaking my chops about it until I eventually agreed.”

Stallone is in excellent shape for a man of 67, three years the junior of his adversary, and it’s a testament to both that they performed the fight scenes themselves.

But despite De Niro’s Oscar-winning prowess, the man who played La Motta wasn’t the most intimidating opponent Sly has come up against.

“I’ve had the misfortune of sparring with some really good guys,” Sly laughed. “Roberto Duran, Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers.”

The last named fought Muhammad Ali for the World Heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden in 1977, an epic contest which Ali won on points but commented afterwards that his opponent had hit him so hard, “it shook my kinfolk back in Africa”.

Stallone has a similar memory from an audition for Rocky III, with Shavers up for the part of Clubber Lang eventually made famous by Mr T.

“Earnie promised not to hit me in the head but he hit me in the shoulder and literally knocked me across the ring and out of the shot and it was a widescreen lens,” he winces.

“We also looked at Joe Frazier for one of the Rocky films but he came out of his corner and hit the guy he was sparring with and the whole thing lasted 11 seconds and that included the count.

“I was like ‘thanks guys, but I think we’ll use an actor instead.’

“I have tremendous respect for all fighters and I always tell people that if you get in the ring with even the worst heavyweight in the world, this guy is still going to knock you out.

“People don’t appreciate the skill and the science of it.”

Grudge Match is in cinemas from Friday.