\u2018Real life Rocky Balboa\u2019: Local blue collar battler has eyes set on Victoria pro match<\/a><\/p>\nOnly it\u2019s not a gimmick.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people can really relate to the guy that works 10 hours a day, goes for a run in the morning, comes and trains at night. Just working his butt off,\u201d Heit said.<\/p>\n
The plan in Vegas? Schtick and move.<\/p>\n
Standing across the ring was American heavyweight Joshua Edwards, a Pan Am Games gold medallist, U.S. Olympian, and the prized prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of boxing legend Oscar De La Hoya. Edwards entered the bout 5-0 with five knockouts. None of his previous fights had lasted beyond three rounds.<\/p>\n
An absolute killer.<\/p>\n
So how do you approach that?<\/p>\n
Colantonio laughed at the question.<\/p>\n
The broadcast commentators weren\u2019t overly kind early on, even stumbling over his name at first. Online, the jabs came quickly too.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re making fun of how I look, right? And that\u2019s fair. I play the Rocky character,\u201d Colantonio said.<\/p>\n
But there was one thing he didn\u2019t bring to Vegas: fear.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not scared of anybody. You shouldn\u2019t be at this level if you\u2019re trying to achieve big things and be a world champion. You can\u2019t be fearful of anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Colantonio knew he was going to get hit, and hit hard. The opening rounds were rocky in every sense of the word. Big right hands landed. The American pressed forward.<\/p>\n
But for a fighter known for a bottomless gas tank, the later rounds are where he comes alive.<\/p>\n
In the fifth and sixth, Colantonio began to connect. The pace shifted. The underdog pushed back.<\/p>\n
When the final bell rang, Colantonio had done something no one else had managed: he became the first fighter ever to go the distance with Joshua Edwards.<\/p>\n
And if the fight had been scheduled for 10 rounds?<\/p>\n
\u201cIf that was a 10-round fight, that would have been my fight,\u201d Colantonio said.<\/p>\n
From the blue collar to the blue corner, the boxing world has taken notice. A unanimous decision loss had never felt more like a win.<\/p>\n
World Boxing News splashed his name across its front page. Bigger fights are expected to follow.<\/p>\n
The bandwagon is filling up.<\/p>\n
Just don\u2019t expect to get your hands on one of those \u201cItalian Stallion\u201d shirts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve gotta figure out if it\u2019s copyrighted,\u201d Heit joked.<\/p>\n
That might be the only fight he doesn\u2019t want.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everybody loves an underdog, regardless of the sport. \u201cOn paper we had a two per cent chance of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82,1062],"class_list":["post-496035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-boxing","tag-boxing","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}