How a boy named Mike Kunda grew up to become the ultimate Italian Stallion.
February 4, 1979 was a day that fundamentally changed Mike Kunda.
CBS aired “Rocky,” marking the Oscar-winning film’s television premiere just weeks before the sequel hit theaters. Kunda, then eleven, huddled around a TV set in his family’s Scranton, Pa., home and watched as rough-and-tumble Philadelphia boxer Rocky Balboa trained for his title shot against heavily favored champ Apollo Creed.
The scene that struck home with Kunda wasn’t when gruff manager Mickey chides, “You’re gonna eat lightnin’ and you’re gonna crap thunder,” or when Rocky tinkers with unconventional training tactics like chugging egg yolks and punching frozen slabs of beef in a meat locker. It was when Rocky, who works as a debt collector for a sleazy loan shark, refuses to carry out an order from his boss to break a delinquent customer’s thumbs. His boss, Gazzo, scolds him, and the boss’s bodyguard taunts Rocky, calling him a “meatbag.” Deflated, Rocky yells after them, “I shoulda broke your thumbs!”
“That’s where I was hit with Rocky,” Kunda says. “He gets rejected by his own peers. He’s left to that sad music, walking down the street, bouncing the ball. I said, ‘This is a moment for me.’”
In the three decades since, five more “Rocky” movies have been released, cumulatively grossing upwards of $1 billion worldwide. Movie watchers around the globe have embraced Sylvester Stallone’s title character as the consummate underdog. It’s a particularly passionate fan base, but Kunda might be the most committed and dedicated fan of them all.
Kunda, now forty-five, estimates that he’s seen Rocky flicks 600 times all the way through—and that doesn’t include the countless occasions he’s watched snippets to draw inspiration during a challenging personal moment. Not surprisingly, the repetition has made him a walking encyclopedia of facts and dialogues about all things “Rocky”—from where Rocky’s pet turtles, Cuff and Link, are now (the pet store has been condemned but its owner still has the turtles), to fleeting décor details, like the fact that an incongruous hunting rifle is briefly shown mysteriously hanging on a wall inside Rocky’s apartment.
Kunda and his wife even spent years figuring out where in Philadelphia the individual movie scenes were filmed and mapping them out. They did this in the 1990s, well before Google Maps and smartphones made such a task a simpler pursuit. “We’d take a picture from the TV, get it developed, look around the neighborhood, trying to find the steeple, driving up and down looking for it,” Kunda says. “Once, my wife and I spent fifteen hours driving around.”
Beyond mere trivia, Kunda has managed to cultivate a professional life in which he is Rocky. Winning a high-profile Rocky look-alike contest in Philadelphia in 2006 persuaded him to make a career out of impersonating his idol. So far he has 300 gigs under his wannabe heavyweight championship belt, and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
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Kunda is half-Italian with a brown mane of hair, sunken eyes and the muscular build of his hero. Stallone might have a half-inch on Kunda and slightly broader shoulders. However, with a practiced downward curl of his lip, a makeup-derived left black eye and a few deep-throated “Yo Adrians,” the resemblance is remarkable.
This is no accident. Kunda has been playing Rocky since childhood. Not long after watching the movie he began to dress the part, sporting a leather jacket, Chuck Taylor sneakers and a fedora given to him by his grandfather. The perpetual costume didn’t exactly win him friends.
Bullying is a constant theme of his self-published memoir “Cue the Rocky Music.” Classmates “enjoyed the sport of chasing me,” he wrote in the book, a predicament that wasn’t helped by his full-throttle embrace of the onscreen persona. Other kids made fun of the Rocky costume, tried to steal his fedora and taunted, “Yo, I’m Rocky! I suck at sports but I think I’m Rocky!” Kunda tried learning how to fight and play football to fit in better and defend himself. Neither quite cut it.
“I was a beating waiting to happen,” he explains. “I should have hung a sign on my neck that read, ‘Unaware fool. Please help me.’”
In his teenage years, there was a brief period when Kunda ceased his Rocky role-playing, growing out his hair to embody another Stallone construct, Rambo. Before long, though, he was back to Balboa as a sort of security blanket-meets-tribute.
“You have to imagine, it was the ’80s and there weren’t a lot of people dressing like movie characters. They were wearing MC Hammer pants, and that was never my thing. I was never one to follow trends, I had no style,” he says. “But Rocky was this armor that I had with the coat and the hat…To me, I just wanted to pretend to be Rocky. I didn’t want to be in school. I had to be there, so I thought, ‘Let me just bring this to life.’”
In early adulthood Kunda went from one job to another, hating them all: cop, parking garage attendant, a lengthy stint as manager of an optical company. All told, he estimates he has been fired from about twenty-five jobs—not because he wasn’t a hard worker, but because he “just didn’t want to be there.” Kunda says he was lost, unsure how to be happy.
That all changed in 2006 when friends coaxed him into entering Philadelphia’s national search for a Rocky doppelganger, to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the original film. Contestants paraded in front of a crowd of thousands for the chance at prize money and tickets to the premiere of the sixth movie in the series, “Rocky Balboa.” During the final round of the competition Kunda got up on stage and improvised Rocky-esque answers to questions from a panel of judges, who crowned him the winner.
Kunda took the victory as a quirky honor and figured he’d soon go back to his boring life. The contest win, however, gave him exposure. Soon a children’s camp came calling, asking for Kunda to don his Rocky uniform and do a meet-and-greet with campers. It was his first paid gig as Stallone’s fictional boxer.
Chris Wiseman, a fellow “Rocky” superfan, quickly stepped in as his manager. The two met at the Victor Café, a real-life Italian eatery that was turned into “Adrian’s” for “Rocky Balboa.” Wiseman and Kunda independently befriended the restaurant owners, aware that filming would begin shortly, each wanting to dine there before production. While waiting for their tables at the bar one night, Kunda and Wiseman got to talking and became fast friends.
Wiseman runs an entertainment company focused heavily on musicians and had never represented a celebrity impersonator. Still, he thought Kunda had a knack for emulating Balboa and, on a handshake, agreed to represent him.
“He has all the mannerisms to a tee,” Wiseman says. “I said, ‘Listen, if you’re interested, I’d like to help you. I think you can do more with this. Not only can it be profitable but it could make you enjoy Rocky even more.’ The fact that we’re both legitimate Rocky nuts, not casual fans, certainly helped.”
In that moment, Rocky went from a passion to a profession.
For more of the story, visit narrative.ly
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photos courtesy of narrative.ly
Original story by:
Dena Levitz is a D.C.-based writer and digital media strategist. She’s also pursuing a Master’s in Media Entrepreneurship at American University. You can follow her on Twitter @thatsledes.
Shira Yudkoff is a freelance photographer based in Philadelphia who specializes in portraits and multimedia projects. Follow her on instagram to see her street shots @shirayudkoff.