Apollo Creed

Apollo's fight with Mac Lee Green, set for New Year's Day 1976, falls through when Green hurts his hand. With no other big name available, Apollo decides to celebrate America's 200th birthday by giving a nobody a chance. He picks Rocky Balboa for his nickname, the Italian Stallion, and jokes that it was an Italian who discovered America.

He enters the ring dressed as George Washington and Uncle Sam and treats the whole thing as a joke, until he gets knocked down in round one, something that had never happened to him. The fight goes 15 rounds. Apollo wins by split decision and, still in the ring, says there won't be a rematch.

In the hospital, Apollo reads hate mail and hears people say the fight was fixed. He changes his mind and taunts Rocky in public until he agrees to a Thanksgiving rematch. He trains hard, set on proving who's boss.

He controls most of the fight, but in round 15 he drops the safe plan and goes for the knockout. Both men go down at the end. Rocky beats the count and Apollo doesn't. It's the first loss of his career.

Apollo is calling Rocky's fight against Clubber Lang, who mocks him as a has-been. After Rocky loses and Mickey dies, Apollo finds his old rival and offers to train him. He takes Rocky to the Los Angeles gym where he started, with his old trainer Duke, and teaches him the footwork and speed he used to have.

It's Apollo who talks about the eye of the tiger Rocky had in their first fight. He lends him his stars-and-stripes trunks for the rematch, which Rocky wins. The agreed price is a third fight, just the two of them, in an empty gym. The movie ends on the first punch.

Retired for five years, Apollo can't stand the idea of Soviet boxer Ivan Drago coming over to prove he's better than the Americans. He challenges Drago to an exhibition in Las Vegas and makes his entrance in a show with James Brown singing "Living in America." Rocky and Duke urge caution.

Drago is much bigger and stronger, and Apollo takes a beating from round one. He tells Rocky not to throw in the towel, no matter what. In round two, a blow from Drago drops him for good, and Apollo dies in Rocky's arms in the middle of the ring.

Decades later, the world learns Apollo had a son from an affair, Adonis, who only knew his father through fight tapes. Mary Anne, Apollo's widow, took the boy in as a child. Rocky tells Adonis who won the secret fight at the end of Rocky III: Apollo did.

For his fight against Ricky Conlan in Liverpool, Adonis wears trunks in Apollo's colors, with Johnson on one side and Creed on the other. When he's about to go down, he sees his father in the old footage and gets back up.

Stallone drew on Muhammad Ali and Jack Johnson to create Apollo. Carl Weathers, a former NFL player, played him; Weathers died in February 2024. Apollo's ring nicknames, like Master of Disaster and Count of Monte Fisto, are straight out of Ali's trash-talk playbook.