His Start in Movies Is Rocky

In the late 1920s, a USC football player named Marion Morrison was hired as a prop man on a John Ford movie at the old Fox lot on Western Avenue.

This was common practice for the studios in those days when USC football was the only big-time game in town and Hollywood was only too happy to help out with the recruiting by providing (legal but lucky for the coaches) jobs for star players.

Marion Mitchell Morrison’s football career ended with a broken leg on the practice field. But his movie career offered an interesting development. On the set of John Ford’s picture, the famous director invited the somewhat-oafish athlete to demonstrate a three-point stance on the sound stage for the cast and crew. Marion dutifully did so.

When he hunched over, Ford, a sadistic type, kicked his hands out from under him. The player crashed to the floor chin-first. He got up slowly. “Let’s try that again,” he suggested to the grinning Ford.

When they did so, the player grabbed Ford’s legs and threw him heavily to the floor. Ford sat up and laughed uproariously. A short time later, the erstwhile footballer graduated from prop boy to feature actor. He took the name John Wayne.

What makes this topically interesting today is the fact that Sylvester Stallone, who is by way of being the John Ford of his Hollywood day, this year hired another young athlete to appear in his films, a young fellow whose name is also Morrison--Tommy Morrison.

It is not known whether Stallone kicked his hand out from under him on the first day on the set, but it is to be considered inadvisable. Tommy Morrison is a heavyweight boxing contender whose record is 22-0.

He is also, as it happens, the grand-nephew of the original Morrison whose nickname, Duke, he has expropriated for himself and his ring career.

Tommy Morrison doesn’t look like a fighter. Flaxen hair, no scar tissue, he can see out of both eyes and hear out of both ears. But he has been fighting in a ring since age 7 and professionally since age 15. He is 21.

His illustrious uncle didn’t start out in Hollywood on a marquee as Nephew Tommy is doing in his first picture. Tommy never had to wield a broom or douse a light on a sound stage or clap a screenboard and say “Quiet, everybody, this is a picture!” Stallone has cast him as, in effect, the second lead in the forthcoming Rocky V, due out this week.

Rocky movies are not to be confused with the works of Kafka or Chekhov. They are cartoonish in character, Saturday-matinee-serial in content. But the most famous pugilist of our times is not Iron Mike Tyson or Sugar Ray Leonard. People who have never heard of either one of them know who Rocky Balboa is. Millions around the world who have no idea who Buster Douglas is have a clear idea who Sylvester Stallone’s fictional heavy champion is.

Stallone can stop traffic in neighborhoods where they would say “Who’s that?” if Evander Holyfield trotted past. A case could be made the “Rocky” films are the most famous sequels in the history of movies. Certainly they are the most lucrative. The public won’t let Stallone stop making them. They’ll have more Roman numerals on them than popular Popes before he’s through.

Duke Wayne’s grand-nephew plays Rocky’s protege in the latest episode. He goes from awed adulation of Rocky and good guy to adversary or bad guy as he falls under the spell of an unscrupulous promoter.

His grand-uncle would never permit himself the luxury of being a guy in the black hat. For John Wayne, the character had to be all good, red-white-and-true-blue, flag-carrying and full of noble purpose. A big man himself (6 feet 4), Wayne would not even permit a normal-sized screen rival. His heavies (Ward Bond, Grant Withers, et al) were all outsized men themselves and often former football players.

“My people want to cheer,” Wayne used to tell producers. “They don’t want to see me stealing the cows or beating up on some guy smaller than me.”

Grand-nephew Tommy is not sure whether he wants to buck for an Academy Award--or the heavyweight championship of the world. Pushed into pugilism by his father in lodge fights as a small boy, he graduated to Tough Man contests in Oklahoma bars as a teen-ager. “I fought a lot of drunks and potbellies who thought they were Dempsey,” he says. He convinced most of them to climb back on the truck “but I got burned out. I thought I had been pushed into it. But then, after a year or so, I realized I liked fighting.”

He was good enough to reach the semifinals in the Olympic tryouts, getting eliminated on a split decision by Ray Mercer, who went on to win the Olympic gold medal at Seoul.

Tommy Morrison, who likes to consider himself a boxer-puncher, has not, it is safe to say, been tested in his professional career. He will be next January at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City when he meets the heavyweight trial horse, James (Quick) Tillis.

As for his acting career, it is not likely he will be offered some old Ronald Colman parts. But he can follow a Morrison family tradition and stick to action film. Grand-uncle John rarely appeared in a film in which he wasn’t on a horse or a tank or a battleship. He was capturing Fort Apache or Iwo Jima. John Wayne picture titles told it all, “Flying Leathernecks,” “Operation Pacific,” “Rio Hondo.”

Tommy Morison never met his famous relative. It was almost as if he were an ancestor. But it was said John Wayne should have gone through life thanking the guy who broke his leg for him on the USC practice field. Maybe, Tommy Morrison should hope somebody repeats the favor and shortcuts his career in the ring--and opens up the one on camera. After all, who would you rather be, Rocky Marciano--or Rocky Balboa?