Mickey Goldmill

Mickey Goldmill is a fictional character created by Sylvester Stallone and portrayed by Burgess Meredith in the Rocky film series. Meredith was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the first film, as was his co-star Burt Young. The character's gravelly voice, intense demeanor and popular catchphrases helped make him highly recognizable as well as a common source of parody and satire in pop culture. Development Mickey may be based on Charley Goldman. Both were bantamweights, Jewish, and had similar-sounding names. In addition, Goldman was the boxing trainer of Rocky Marciano, on whom Rocky Balboa is largely based. Goldman trained Marciano in many ways similar to how Goldmill trained Balboa, such as tying their ankles together with string to teach them to spread their feet at the appropriate width. Goldman was (again like Goldmill) well known for making wise remarks (e.g. "A lot of people say Rocky [Marciano] don't look too good in there, but the guy on the ground don't look too good either."). Fictional biography According to his memorial plaque, Mickey Goldmill was born on April 7, 1905, to a Jewish family. He boxed professionally from 1922 until 1947 and achieved great athletic success but never gained any measure of fame or material success. Mickey recalled that he once knocked his opponent, Ginny Russell, out of the ring the same day that Luis Firpo did the same to Jack Dempsey: September 14, 1923. He claimed that the reason his victory did not garner any media attention was that he did not have a manager, while Dempsey did. He retired in 1947, with a record of 72 wins, (70 by knockout) and 1 loss. In 1948 he opened a boxing gym in Philadelphia, Mighty Mick's Boxing, and began to train fighters. There is an apparent continuity error on Mickey's actual birth year. In late 1975, he tells Rocky that he is 76 years old, which would have meant he was born in either 1898 or 1899; however, his memorial plaque in Rocky III says that he was born in 1905. It is possible that he lied about his age (stating that he was 23 when he was actually 17) to start boxing and kept up the pretense for the rest of his life.