Sylvester Stallone will be outside the Philadelphia Museum Art for the grand opening of the new Rocky Shop and to declare Dec. 3 "Rocky Day" in the city this weekend. Rocky himself will be at the event at 11 a.m. Sunday at the Parkway Visitor Center, which sits adjacent to Eakins Oval near the museum. The grand opening event, hosted by the Visitor...

Reigning and undisputed ONE strawweight kickboxing world champion Jonathan Di Bella is proud of his Italian heritage, and he wants to return to his motherland to show off his new gold hardware. Di Bella captured the highly coveted ONE Championship gold in October of last year, and has become one of the most prominent Italian fighters in the promoti...

Tragically, as surely all fight fans know, the great Rocky Marciano lost his life at the young age of just 45, this on this day back in 1969. Perishing in a plane crash, Rocky died the day before what would have been his 46th birthday. Indeed, it was 100 hundred years ago today, September 1st, when the man plenty of historians say deserves to be ra...

Joe Tiberi, one of the top boxers in Delaware history, was among nine athletes inducted into the Delaware Sports Museum & Hall of Fame, and honored at the state’s premier sports banquet on May 18 in Wilmington. Joe Tiberi had an amateur boxing record of 44-4-2 with 31 knockouts, followed by a professional record of 18-5-2 with 13 knockouts during t...

Ninety years ago there was an Italian boxer who in the United States, which had become his second homeland, won a match against an opponent from Boston, becoming thanks to that victory a legend of Italian sports. That knockout not only won him a world title, but made him a symbol of redemption for the Italians who had emigrated from the many rural...

Italy's Irma Testa won the gold medal at the Women's World Boxing Championships in New Delhi, India, in the featherweight (57 kg) category. Testa, who is 25 years old and was born in Torre Annunziata, Campania, Italy, won the gold after beating Kazakhstan's Karina Ibragimova in the final by a score of 5-0. In 2021, at the Tokyo Olympics, she had wo...

Willie Pep, a defensive wizard who was arguably the best pound-for-pound pugilist in boxing history (ranked #5 on ESPN’s 50 Greatest Fighters), could bob, slip and weave past hundreds of punches per match, giving him the edge he needed to win 229 out of 241 fights from 1940-66. Pep, aka Guglielmo Papaleo — a two-time world featherweight champion, w...

Cus D’Amato, arguably the greatest boxing trainer of all time, produced three world heavyweight champions: Floyd Patterson, Jose Torres, and Mike Tyson. No one else achieved such success. A pugilistic genius, Cus used the values from his Italian heritage to change the lives of many troubled kids. The Beginning Constantine “Cus” D’Amato was born in...

First-generation, Italian American Rocky Marciano’s training routine and incredible determination continue to define his unbeaten boxing legacy. Marciano’s distinguished boxing career achieved a 49-0 record with 43 knockouts and compiled an 88% knockout rate of his heavyweight opponents. Marciano achieved the unimaginable as an undersized fighter w...

Joey Giardello wasn’t born with that name, but it’s the one that became famous. Well, famous enough to land him a statue on East Passyunk Avenue, and to bring standing prominent enough for a defamation suit over a Hollywood movie starring Denzel Washington. (The lawyer who got that suit settled, George Bochetto, has a connection to another statue:...