Movies - TV
Sylvester Stallone Needed Surgery After Fighting Carl Weathers In Rocky II
By DREW TINNIN
After the draw between Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky and Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed in “Rocky,” the no-holds-barred rematch in “Rocky II” might be the most brutal fight in the franchise's history. Not one to pull punches, Stallone wound up in the hospital during filming after tearing his pectoral muscle so severely he could barely throw a punch — and that wasn’t the only injury he sustained.
The way both actors were going at it, Stallone and Weathers might as well have been in a real fight. In an interview with Roger Ebert in June 1979, Stallone explained the extreme level of punishment he endured, saying, “I got all beat up inside, I had to have an operation to splice things back together. The mouthpiece saved my teeth. For this one, basically what I need is a mouthpiece for my whole body.”
Stallone later told Ebert that he also suffered broken bones, along with “enlarged intestines, rearranged insides” and significant weight loss. The “Rocky II” fight eclipsed the brawl in “Rocky,” as Stallone pointed out, “The fight's four times as long and has eight times as many punches as the first one. A lot of those shots aren't faked. It's as hard to learn not to hit somehow as to hit them.”