Five words in a woman’s handwriting, across a Rocky Balboa poster. The poster hangs at the top of the staircase in my home in Kuala Lumpur, in a black frame, under a small spotlight. I pass it whenever I am home. She wrote it for me in a bookshop in Kuala Lumpur on January 22, 2007. She was eighty-five years old, and she was Sylvester Stallone’s mother. I have been trying to answer her question ever since.
In 1988 I was a student in a teachers’ college in Malaysia, with no internet, no email and no way of reaching a Hollywood star. What I had was a magazine and a dormitory wall. I copied out Stallone’s words and pinned them up, and I began writing a book about the man who had said them. I did not know that a book could take a boy from Butterworth into a newsroom, onto a midnight bus to Singapore, and nearly twenty years later up an escalator beside his mother. I only knew that I wanted to go the distance.
The Story I Had to Tell
“And unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t able to tell their story.”
Sylvester Stallone, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, 2026
When I heard Stallone say those words, something struck me.
For years, my work as a journalist had involved telling other people’s stories. I interviewed personalities, listened to their experiences and turned them into articles for readers. That was my daily work.
Writing In the Eye of the Tiger was something deeply personal. It was a project I had chosen for myself, a dream that took me beyond the routine of assignments and deadlines. My fascination with Stallone and Rocky, and my determination to finish that book, became part of what made my own journey unique.
In 2007, Jacqueline Stallone came to Kuala Lumpur to launch it. It was an extraordinary moment, one that had seemed almost impossible just weeks earlier.
The book explored the survival principles in Stallone’s life and films. Behind its pages was my own experience of trying to put those ideas into practice: the boy who watched First Blood in 1982, the young man who dreamed of writing about his hero, and the journalist who kept working to bring that dream into print.
Nearly twenty years later, I wanted to tell that experience more fully: how writing the book had shaped my life, and what the people I met along the way had taught me.
My Rocky Story: One More Round is my attempt to tell it.
Not because my life is extraordinary, but because I believe ordinary people have stories worth telling too.
And sometimes, all it takes is one story to change another person’s life.
In my daily work, I told other people’s stories. Writing my Rocky book became a story of my own. This memoir is my chance to tell that journey more fully. It isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t need to be. If it’s perfect, it’s not a story. My Rocky story is about finding my voice and telling it as it is. Now I want to ask you the same question. What is your Rocky story?
What this book is
In 2007 I published In the Eye of the Tiger, a fan’s exploration of the survival principles in Stallone’s life and films. This memoir tells what happened to the fan.
Writing about Stallone had already become an important part of my own life. The research, the years of persistence and the people who helped me bring the book into print were experiences I wanted to understand and record. I had spent years asking people about the moments that had changed them. Now I wanted to ask those questions about the project that had meant so much to me.
Years later, I heard Stallone describe his own apprenticeship in writing. As a young cinema usher earning $34 a week, he treated the theater as a classroom. He copied dialogue, recorded films and filled notebooks. “I was working on the craft,” he recalled. My apprenticeship was different. As a schoolboy, I studied newspaper columns, particularly Scorpion Tales by the late Rehman Rashid, whose writing about Malaysian life showed me how an opening could draw readers in and how observation could become commentary. Years later, Rehman reviewed my own book. I brought those lessons into entertainment journalism, along with a habit of researching every subject as thoroughly as I could. That habit has stayed with me through this new edition. Writing is a craft learned through attention, patience and repetition.
I had my own education in writing, beginning in my school days. I read the columns of established journalists, especially Rehman Rashid's Scorpion Tales, and admired the way a strong opening could lead into an observation about Malaysian life. I learned from those creative introductions and from the way commentary could grow naturally out of a story. Years later, Rehman would review my own book. As an entertainment writer, I tried to bring that attention to the opening and the telling of a story into my interviews. The other habit I developed was research: leaving no stone unturned. I still do it now, returning to the original interviews and updating this book. Stallone's apprenticeship and mine were not the same, but his words reminded me that writing is a craft learned by doing it repeatedly.
“I was working on the craft.”
Sylvester Stallone, video on his verified Facebook account, 2026
Why had this dream stayed with me? Why had I nearly abandoned it? What had trying to finish taught me that I could not have learned simply by watching the films?
I am writing in October 2026, in the house in Butterworth where I grew up. I tell the story in the order it happened, from the dormitory wall to the bookshop, and then forward to now.
I have drawn on my diaries, emails and letters, the newspaper cuttings I kept, and recordings of my own voice. A camera crew filmed the days of Jacqueline’s visit on MiniDV tape, from the airport to the hotel to the bookshop, and I still have the tapes. Where my memory was unsure, I have said so.
Sylvester Stallone’s life and work run through these pages because they helped me make sense of my own. I do not claim that he knows this memoir exists, and nothing in it speaks for him. His words are quoted from named sources.
The revised In the Eye of the Tiger returns to the ideas that first inspired me. My Rocky Story: One More Round follows my attempt to live with those ideas while pursuing a dream of my own. Each book can be read separately.
The story under the story
I have wondered whether taking so long to tell this story would count against it. But the passing years have helped me understand things I could not see clearly while I was living through them. I have greater tenderness toward the young man who began and greater appreciation for the people who helped him.
I do not want the time it has taken to become another reason for leaving it unfinished.
My faith is part of how I understand the journey. I believe the abilities we are given carry a responsibility to use them well. I experienced Jacqueline’s support as a blessing, and finishing this account is one way of expressing my gratitude.
Writing it has also brought me back to something I believed when interviewing others: everyone carries a story worth telling, at the point where life has touched them most deeply. Mine happened to involve Rocky. Yours will be your own. A story does not have to be perfect to be told, and I think a perfect one would not be a story at all.
What stays with me most is the character of the people who helped: their generosity, their willingness to listen, their decision to care. Intelligence and ambition matter, but so do the values that guide them and the heart we bring to other people.
I have my own way of putting it: “To be smart is to have heart.”
I do not mean being clever enough to outsmart others, manipulate situations, or calculate every move for personal advantage. I mean having the wisdom to recognize what truly matters and the courage to act upon it with honesty and sincerity.
Sometimes the smartest thing we can do makes no logical sense at all. Why would someone sacrifice so much for a dream with no guarantee of success? Why keep going when the odds are against you, when there is nothing to gain and every practical reason to give up?
Perhaps because the heart understands something the mind cannot always explain.
I believe that when we follow our hearts with genuine intentions, life has a way of testing us. The obstacles, the disappointments, the sacrifices—perhaps they are there to reveal how sincere we really are and whether we have what it takes to go the distance.
There is no guarantee that everything will turn out as we hope. But sometimes, when we persist for the right reasons, doors open in ways we could never have planned.
Looking back at my own journey, I cannot help wondering whether that was what happened to me. I had spent years pursuing a dream that made little practical sense. Yet when I finally decided I would finish my book even if I received nothing in return, something extraordinary happened.
Jacqueline Stallone entered my life.
And perhaps that is the greatest lesson Rocky taught me: going the distance is not simply about how strong or clever you are. It is about how much heart you are willing to put into something you truly believe in.
I did not know, in 1988, how it would end. I still do not, because I am still in the middle of it.
This is my Rocky story, and this is one more round.
Gerald Chuah
Butterworth, Penang
October 2026