Thomas Rocco Barbella was born in 1919 in New York City. Nowadays he is best known from the famous Rocky films inspired by him. Rocky grew up on the streets of New York. He began to commit crimes such as stealing but in 1939 he began boxing and he won the title of the Metropolitan AAU welterweight. He decided that boxing is a nice way of making money after selling his gold medal for $15.

In 1942 Rocky joined the army, after which he became a professional boxer. Rocky Graziano fought his first title fight in 1946 against middleweight champion Tony Zale and even though Zale kept his title it was a very close game. In 1947 Graziano returned for a rematch and he became the middleweight champion of the world by dethroning Zale. The next year Zale defeated Rocky again but Rocky responded with a series of wins. The challengers continued to come and in 1948, Sugar Ray Robinson took his title. Even though Rocky lost the fight, Robinson claimed that he wasn’t stung like that by another boxer. He retired after losing his next boxing match to Chuck Davey. At Rocky’s funeral in 1990 Vito Antuofermo said that Rocky was “tough, could hit like a mule and had all the guts in the world.”