Rocky Balboa

The name gets invoked whenever someone talks about getting up off the floor. Rocky Balboa is a fictional boxer — the central figure of the Rocky films — and the reason his story travels so far beyond the ring is that he was written as someone with almost nothing to start from. A working-class Italian-American out of the Philadelphia slums, born in 1946, he begins as a club fighter, picking up money on the side as an enforcer for a local loan shark. That is the starting position audiences remember, and it is what makes everything after it land.

The character was created by Sylvester Stallone, who also played him in eight of the nine films in the franchise. Across those films Rocky is shown as a professional boxer and later a trainer, and the through-line is consistent: obstacles arrive, in his life and in his career, and he works through them rather than around them.

That is really the whole of the appeal. There is no special talent in the setup, no advantage handed over, no shortcut out of Philadelphia. What the films offer instead is the picture of a man who keeps turning up, which is why clips of him tend to end up in motivational feeds rather than film-history ones.