RIP Carl Weathers
The actor who played Apollo Creed was a proud San Diego State alum and football player
I don’t know about you, but I’ve played this game many times where you ask your friends, “who are the most famous alums from your college?”
This was definitely a 1990s game, or maybe early 2000s, one of those games where you just trusted that everyone was telling the truth because we didn’t have the internet in our pocket to fact check yet.
For me, I’d start with the usual famous athletics alums from San Diego State: Tony Gwynn, Mark Grace, Marshall Faulk, Brian Sipe and Michael Cage. In more recent years, Kawhi Leonard, Stephen Strasburg and Rashaad Penny.
But the real fun is when you start bragging about the non-athlete famous alums.
“We’ve got the guy who invented the fish taco,” I’d say.
“We’ve got the Mom from Happy Days,” I’d declare.
Or …
“We’ve got Apollo Creed,” I’d boast. “Yes, Apollo Creed! The actor is Carl Weathers. He played football at SDSU and then became a famous actor. Yo, Apollo!!”
Game. Set. Match.
As you might have read, Carl Weathers passed away earlier today at the age of 76. In a statement, his family wrote he “died peacefully in his sleep.”
Most famous for his role as Apollo Creed in the Rocky series, he also appeared in The Predator as Colonel Al Dillion, three seasons of The Mandalorian (earning an Emmy nomination in 2021), and made us laugh in Happy Gilmore (as Adam Sandler’s golf coach with the fake wooden hand). He was also an accomplished director with credits including Law & Order, Hawaii Five-O and Silk Stalkings. His IMDb page is epic.
Weathers was the ultimate student-athlete success story and he always remained proud of his SDSU roots. He was a defensive lineman for Don Coryell on the 1968 and 1969 teams, the latter was the legendary 11-0 team that won the Pasadena Bowl, finished 19th in the nation, and outdrew the Chargers in attendance at their own stadium.
Last year, he was back on campus for a night of stories and motivation, and man alive, do I wish I could have attended. I read the stories and watched the videos. My favorite was the simplicity of his “recruitment” to Montezuma Mesa.
He described the improbable circumstances of his enrollment at what was then San Diego State College, when his sister admitted a man to their Long Beach home who identified himself as a coach, awakening him in his bedroom on a Saturday morning.
“OK, let’s go,” Weathers remembered thinking. “It was really so ridiculously simple.”
Weathers performed in plays in grade school in Louisiana and took theatre classes as a student at SDSU. After one season with the Oakland Raiders and two years in the Canadian Football League, Weathers returned to his first love of acting.
The role of Apollo Creed put him on the map, first as a cocky opponent for Rocky Balboa easily disliked; then the franchise’s heart and soul, rehabilitating the defeated former champion in Rocky III with his motivation and old school training techniques; and his character’s shocking death in the ring in Rocky IV set the stage for the ultimate showdown against the steroid-filled Ivan Drago in Moscow.
I’ll never forget watching Rocky IV in the movie theatre. It was a day off from school in late 1985, probably during the Christmas break. My Dad took me. Unplanned, a lot of my classmates had the same idea. One of those beautiful mini hangouts that organically occurred before a endless barrage of text messages were required to coordinate plans.
At some point early in the movie, somebody yelled something that got the audience stirring. A few more comments continued and the audience became even more engaged.
When Apollo died, the audience was stunned. We were angry for retribution.
By the end of the movie, in the legendary training montage scene, our movie theatre sounded like a raucous sporting event. We were cheering, clapping our hands, yelling at the screen, as if Rocky could hear us.
“Kill the Commie Bastard!” someone yelled, and we all screamed louder.
In the final round, with each dramatic punch delivered by an exhausted Rocky, we chanted Rocky’s name in unison. Audience members leapt from their seat when the Russian went down for good.
I’m telling you, I’ve never experienced anything like that in a movie theatre in my life.
I don’t remember exactly when I learned that Carl Weathers attended SDSU. Maybe it was thumbing through those bulky college catalogs in the high school Career Center. Maybe it was a listing of famous alumni inside a freshman orientation package. Maybe it was flipping through old editions of The Daily Aztec for inspiration.
I just know that it was immense pride that Carl Weather, the man who played Apollo Creed with all his amazing nicknames – “the King of Sting” … and “The Dancing Destroyer” … and “The Prince of Punch” … and “The Count of Monte Fisto” … and the best of them all, “The Master of Disaster” – attended the same school as me.
Fareful to a fellow alum, a football star turned actor, beloved by his cast-mates and fans around the world, a larger-than-life figure with a heart even bigger than his biceps, and the greatest fictional boxing champion-turned-trainer of all time.