Codename: Apollo

A Brief Timeline of Carl Weathers' Life

1948 – Born. Louisiana.

1948-Early 70’s – Gym and acting lessons.

Early 70’s – Professional football. Oakland Raiders.

1974 – Retires from football to pursue acting career.

1976 – Rocky. Plays Apollo Creed.

Stay in school and use your brain. Be a doctor, be a lawyer, carry a leather briefcase. Forget about sports as a profession. Sports make ya grunt and smell. See, be a thinker, not a stinker.

1976-1987 – Various Rocky movies, probably getting laid a lot, having mixed feelings about only being called Apollo at bars/by women/by family.

1987 – Predator. Expresses desire to costars Ventura and Schwarzenegger to run an insurgent campaign for governor. Promises costars jobs in his administration, but privately plans on reneging, can’t have ‘roided-up meatheads like that on staff.

1987-1996 – Dead to me.

1996 – Happy Gilmore.

Just easing the tension, baby. Just easing the tension.

1996-2005 – Contrary to popular belief, not killed in a meth lab explosion. Little is known about this period. Some suspect this may have been the beginning of Weathers’ strategic partnership with the Pentagon, Codename: Apollo (over Weathers’ strong objections).

2005 – Arrested Development.

Let me tell you a little story about acting. I was doing this Showtime movie—Hot Ice with Anne Archer—never once touched my per diem. I’d go to Craft Service, get some raw veggies, bacon, Cup-A-Soup— baby, I got a stew going.

2006 – Rumored to be first in line to replace Donald Rumsfeld, based primarily on the success of his efforts to train U.S. soldiers shipping out to Iraq.

Out here, 150 miles northeast of Los Angeles, units of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., are among the latest war-bound troops who have gone through three weeks of training that introduce them to the harsh episodes that characterize the American experience in Iraq.

In a 1,000-square-mile region on the edge of Death Valley, Arab-Americans, many of them from the Iraqi expatriate community in San Diego, populate a group of mock villages resembling their counterparts in Iraq. American soldiers at forward operating bases nearby face insurgent uprisings, suicide bombings and even staged beheadings in underground tunnels. Recently, the soldiers here, like their counterparts in Iraq, have been confronted with Sunni-Shiite riots. At one village, a secret guerrilla revolt is in the works.

It is a marriage of military technology and Hollywood fakery; some 350 Arabic-speaking Iraqi-Americans and plainclothes Nevada National Guardsman live here almost year-round to offer American trainees what one officer described as "a vortex of chaos." The insurgents even get acting lessons, coached by Carl Weathers, best known for his portrayal of the boxer Apollo Creed in the "Rocky" films.