Clubber Lang Needs His Own Movie

In 1982, Mr. T portrayed the most complex ROCKY villain ever. Here’s why he should get his own spinoff movie, and why he never will.

Between the Apollo Creed of ROCKY and ROCKY II and Ivan Drago of ROCKY IV was a little discussed ROCKY adversary named Clubber Lang.

Lang wasn’t pretty. He wasn’t flashy. He wasn’t witty and poetic like Ali at his preening best. He fought like Tyson, but he spoke like a charged-up Malcolm X, furious and focused and political:

“Why don’t you tell all these nice folks why you been ducking me?” Lang demands of Rocky, who at that moment is attending the dedication of a statue commemorating his success. “Politics, man!” Shouts Lang. “This country wants to keep me down. Keep everybody weak! They don’t want a man like me to have the title because I’m not a puppet like that fool up there!”

Who else in the ROCKY films talks like this? Who else points to social issues, however fleetingly, who else challenges the status quo, and the racial undertones bubbling just under the surface of this enduring, Capra-esque franchise, with its good-natured, optimistic, working-class hero?

No one.

And that’s why, I submit, that while Drago and his family appear in multiple films, and Apollo Creed and his family are the basis for an entire spinoff franchise, Stallone gave Lang—his fiercest, most complex opponent, just one movie, before sending him hastily on his way. He was too much of a threat to the ROCKY universe—and its facile approach to race, class, and America. Stallone has said publicly that he regrets killing off Apollo Creed in ROCKY IV. But he probably regrets more NOT killing Clubber Lang in ROCKY III. Because that means he’s still out there, hanging like a shadow over the franchise, undermining and complicating its wobbly foundations.

For the non-fan: ROCKY III takes place a few years after Rocky has won the title from Apollo Creed. A montage at the film’s start shows us that Rocky has won ten title defenses. His star has risen outside the ring as well: He’s appeared in commercials (for jeans, watches, the American Express card). He’s been a guest on the Muppet Show. Fans swarm him wherever he goes. He and his wife Adrian remain moony-eyed. He’s living the good life, light-years from that of the impoverished palooka we met in the first film.

Parenthetically, the film’s storyline continues to parallel that of its creator’s own life. By 1982, having been catapulted to fame by the first film, Stallone, like Rocky, was now a megastar. ROCKY III asks a question that Stallone was no doubt pondering around that same time: what next for the person who’s achieved his wildest dreams?

Admirably, Stallone allows Rocky to appear smug, self-satisfied, and materialistic in the film’s first half. He’s bought his own considerable hype. Twice during the film, onscreen bands play “Gonna Fly Now”— the rousing training-sequence anthem from the first two movies—which would be a little like Luke Skywalker humming the STAR WARS theme while piloting his X-Wing. Rocky and Stallone are conflated. Inside and outside the world of the film, the myth of Rocky is alive and well.

But a wrecking ball awaits: lurking in the crowd as Balboa wins one match after another is a shadowy, silent figure. He’s big, muscular, and proudly Black: his hair is shaved into a Mohawk. He wears feathered earrings and gold chains. In fight after fight, he watches Balboa in the ring, the movie’s theme song providing context and underscoring:

It’s the eye of the tiger, it’s the thrill of the fight

Rising up to the challenge of a rival

And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night

And he’s watching us all with the eye of the tiger.

The eye of the song’s title, in other words, is not Rocky’s—it’s the eye of this man watching him. ROCKY III, the song suggests, is as much the story of this mysterious figure as it is about Rocky himself.

Tellingly, the montage abruptly switches perspective: now we’re seeing the rival’s life: solitary. Austere. Single-minded. Ruthless. He trains hard. He punches hard. He shows no mercy:

“I want Balboa!” he shouts to Mickey, Rocky’s crusty, white trainer, who sits in the audience at one of his fights, looking ashen at being singled out by the brutally effective pugilist. “I’m coming after him! You tell him!”   

The man, of course, is Clubber Lang, in the intimidating form of Mr. T, in his first major film role. “I want a shot at the title,” Lang tells reporters as the montage ends. “If Balboa’s got the guts to meet me in the ring or anywhere else. He can’t duck me forever.” And then, quoting Joe Louis, another champion famous for battling racial injustice, he adds, “He can run, but he can’t hide.”

A half-hour of running-time later, Lang is being held aloft by his coaches: he’s defeated Rocky in two short rounds. “I’m the greatest in the world!” He says. “I did it! I told you I’d do it! I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!” Rocky hangs his head. Mickey, who Clubber shoves backstage before the fight, has a heart attack and dies. Rocky, distraught, howls like a wounded animal.

With a few well-timed punches, Clubber has taken everything from the film’s hero: his title. His mentor and father figure. His dignity, his manhood. Prior to the fight, Mickey admitted to Rocky that his title defenses were against less than main-event pugilists: “They was good fighters,” says the Mick. “But they wasn’t killers like this guy. He’ll knock you to tomorrow, Rock.”

Much of Rocky’s success after his bout with Apollo, it appears, has been a sham. When he gets in the ring to prove that he’s not a fake, that he’s still the fighter he once was—Clubber proves him, devastatingly and overwhelmingly, wrong. The Rocky edifice has been shattered.

From the outset, it’s clear that Lang is on a mission—and one subtly different from Rocky’s. Asked in the first film if he believes in the American Dream, Rocky has a one-word answer: “Yeah.” And later in the film, we see that he’s come to see his fight with Creed as his path to a singular and exceptional identity: “If that bell rings and I’m still standing,” he tells Adrian on the eve of his bout with Creed, “Then I’m going to know in the first time in my life, see, that I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.” Going the distance with Creed will validate him, raise him up—get him one step closer to the American Dream he fervently—and reflexively—believes in.

Lang has no such aspirations—and no such faith in America. He sees through the cracks of Rocky’s story—otherwise absent in the ROCKY story—to the systematic corruption and racism that raises a man like Rocky up, and keeps a man like him down: “Politics, man.” His mission, by sheer dint of determination, relentless effort, and monk-like self-sacrifice, is to tear down the walls preventing “a man like him”—meaning, implicitly, a Black man who refuses to keep silent and play by the rules—to achieve success. If America won’t cough up its Dream, by God, Clubber is going to beat that dream out of it.   

This is most evident in the statue-dedication scene, where Lang, unable to secure the title shot he deserves through normal channels, shows up to crash Balboa’s party. Here, as throughout the film and in the entire ROCKY series, Clubber is an uninvited guest, seizing attention from the film’s nominal hero:

“Don’t give this sucker no statue!” Says Lang. “Give him guts! I told you I wasn’t going away!”

“I am ranked number one! One!” Lang tells the crowd. “That means I’m the best. But this bum has been taking easy matches. Fighting other bums. I’m telling you I’ll fight him anywhere, anytime, for nothing.”

The implication: Balboa is soft and overly civilized. Contrasting himself to the film’s newly buttoned-up, high-living hero, Lang insists doesn’t want money—he just wants what’s coming to him:

“Balboa, your family’s doing real nice ain’t it? You call yourself a fighter, prove it now. Give me that same chance.”   

Is the American Dream—the one Rocky chased and caught so spectacularly—real, he asks? Or does it only apply to white contenders fighting Black champions? In a country guilty of immortalizing racially divisive historical figures in exactly the same way Balboa himself is being honored in this scene, Lang’s choice of venue could not be more poignant. When Clubber protests, “Don’t give this sucker no statue, give him guts!” he might as well be talking to the American public: Who, exactly, are you honoring, he demands, and who are you ignoring?

When Rocky demurs, Lang plays his ace in the hole:

“Hey woman!” He shouts to Adrian. “Since your man ain’t got no heart, how’d you like to see a real man? I bet you lay awake at night dreaming you had a real man. Well tell you what, bring your pretty little self over to my apartment tonight and I’ll show you a real man.”

Rocky flys into a rage. “You want it, you got it!” He shouts, charging Lang from the podium. The police get between them. It’s pandemonium.

In a franchise almost entirely devoid of sexuality, Lang’s crude come-on to Adrian is shocking, shot through with echos of Emmett Till, the Ku Klux Clan, and BIRTH OF A NATION: the privileged white man’s evergreen terror that primitive Black men are out to steal their wives. It’s the age-old, ugly underside of American race relations, a counter-narrative that punches the franchise’s uncomplicated portrayal of race and American exceptionalism right in the face.

In the hands of a different actor, this scene might well come across as racist: Clubber is a sexually-insatiable savage who deserves to be put in his place, preferably by a noble white man. But, due largely to Mr. T’s cagey performance, the scene doesn’t read that way. Lang’s threat is a brilliant provocation that plays shrewdly on the racism Lang knows is latent in Rocky Balboa, and—quite possibly—in us, the movie’s (mostly) white audience as well. Now he’s gone too far, we think, right along with Rocky. Now he must be stopped.

At the top of the scene, Balboa holds all the cards: he’s rich, adored, and on the verge of retirement. But that single, racially-charged remark from Lang is all it takes for Rocky to put all that at risk. He plays Balboa like a drum, laying bare the racial animosity the movies otherwise repress. It’s game, set, and match for Clubber.

As the non-fan may or may not know, Rocky regains his title in the film’s final reel, in large part by taking on Apollo Creed, his former rival, as a trainer. Creed, who is Black, schools Rocky on how to rely less on brute strength and knockout power, and how to prevail instead with defense, speed, feints, misdirection, and footwork—the hallmarks of great Black fighters, as critic Joaquin Saravia points out here—to beat the overwhelmingly powerful Lang. Creed’s plan, in other words, is to create an indomitable mashup of a white fighter and a Black fighter—Elvis in boxing gloves.

In this sense, Stallone is drawing on a well-worn movie trope, one that plays for both dramatic and comic effect in a variety of films: the white character who turns to a Black ally to learn some stereotypically Black trait or skill: rhythm (SAVE THE LAST DANCE), intuition (SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER), seduction (HITCH). The discomforting implication is that the primary function of talented Black people is not to achieve for themselves but to impart wisdom and skill to a white character so they can achieve  in their stead.

In the final rematch against Clubber, Rocky prevails—first by bobbing and weaving around the stronger fighter’s punches—the better to show his newfound “Black” skills—and then by ‘manning up’ and taking all the punishment Clubber has to offer. As Saravia points out, he has to beat Lang both ways—not only as a wily, sleight-of-hand fighter like Ali, but as brutal, hammer-fisted slugger like Chuck Wepner, the original (white) inspiration for Rocky. However he may have appeared earlier in the film, he can take all he dishes out.

With the help of Apollo, then, the white man has become a better Black man than the Black man. At the fight’s conclusion, Clubber hangs his head, his fiery spirit broken. Balboa doesn’t congratulate or hug him. The threat to American exceptionalism, and the fiery voice of protest that Lang represented, has been vanquished, papered over by the hope of racial harmony that the friendship between Apollo and Rocky represents.

Is it not a little too easy? Is the movie suggesting that Clubber’s gloriously angry voice simply needs to be silenced? That the “correct” place for the Black man, and Blackness, is to give the white man a leg up on his way to conquest? As much as the movie is jury-rigged against Clubber Lang, on the most recent viewing, I had a hard time getting excited at the sight of the white Stallone beating the stuffing out of the Black Mr. T in the film’s final reel.

Unfortunately, the last few moments of ROCKY III give us something of a cop-out, implying that, indeed, it’s just that simple: beat them enough, and the Clubbers of this world will just go away. After coaching Balboa to victory, Creed wants a single favor from Rocky: a one-on-one rematch in the old gym: “No TVs, no cameras, just you and me,” says Creed. Balboa has the championship; Apollo wants his consolation prize. The two josh back and forth before, finally, almost playfully, they throw simultaneous punches at each other’s heads. The freeze-frame dissolves into a painting of the two friends, Apollo and Rocky, their respective skin colors melting into abstract greens and pinks, all racial animosity dissolved into play-fighting with padded gloves.