The movie Rocky is, by far, my favorite of all time. The film was released on November 21, 1976. You can bet I observed the 40th anniversary of the 1977 Oscar winner for Best Picture by giving it a complete, start-to-finish viewing, reciting all the lines that I have memorized, engrained in the limbic system of my brain through the staggering number of times I’ve seen the entire flick.
Everyone in my world knows that in the movie the character, Rocky Balboa, is an unknown club fighter who gets a shot at becoming the heavyweight champion of the world. The bout is with Apollo Creed, the “Master of Disaster,” the “King of Sting,” the “Count of Monte Fisto.” (The last one is my favorite.) Apollo far outclasses Balboa in terms of speed and boxing skill. But through hard, grueling training, determination, and sheer will, Rocky goes the distance with Apollo Creed. He doesn’t win the fight, but he proves that he has the heart of a champion.
But as much as I love the underdog theme of the story, I treasure even more Rocky’s backstory. There is criminality in his life. There is a dismal bleakness that he endures daily along with abuse from certain supporting characters. Yet, he is a soft, kindhearted palooka who won’t break a man’s thumbs for his loan shark boss, who will take a girl off the street corner to walk her home and impart some wisdom about choosing friends. Rocky rises above all of the negative noise of his life so that he can know, for the first time in his life, that he wasn’t “just another bum from the neighborhood.”
So here we are, a nation still fresh off of a Presidential Election, waiting to rise. We as a nation need a “Rocky.” And I believe infrastructure can be just that. It’s the underdog that can fight its way into the light of respectability. Think about the parallels here. Rocky was a clean-cut little boy who ended up in a hard scrabble life. Our roads, bridges, and highways; our electrical grid, ports and airports, and railways were all once the envy of the world. But, like Rocky, life eventually had beaten it all down into a dismal bleakness continuing to take abuse. Now is the time to rise. We’ve always had a shot at the title. We as a nation have to make the commitment to work hard to get infrastructure back in shape. We are its “heart.” We have to overcome everything that’s been stopping infrastructure from reaching its potential. We have to train like this:
