The ultimate ‘Rocky’ fan has rebuilt the show’s iconic locations inside his NY home

Yo, Philly. Meet Joey Umana, a Rocky fan like no other.

He saw it on the big screen when he was 14, and now this 62-year-old super-aficionado has watched each Rocky movie about 100 times — “at least!”

Rocky Balboa spoke to him from the start.

“I loved that he was the underdog. I love that,” Umana said. “He didn’t even care if he won the fight. He just wanted to go the distance, and that’s what I’ve been doing my whole life.”

Over the years, he’s amassed all manner of Rocky memorabilia: posters, autographs, signed boxing gloves. Once he showed up at a bleary-eyed-early hour outside a hotel where the man himself was staying — Sylvester Stallone — in the hopes of getting a photo taken together. Indeed, the gods of fandom smiled. That was decades ago.

But since last November, Umana’s taken his devotion to a whole other level. Umana, a retired truck driver, had never been an arts-and-crafts guy but began building intricate replicas of sites from the Rocky movies. He did it all freestyle. No instructions.

“I had no idea what I was doing. I said, ‘Let me see if I can do this.’ I just found a talent I never knew I had.”

Thousands of tiny bricks, tiles, and various other building materials later, not to mention all those mementos he collected over the years, Umana has created a veritable shrine to all things Italian Stallion — a Rocky Room right in his home.

In 2022, Umana and his son Joey, now 33, made a pilgrimage from their home in Levittown, Long Island — first to attend an autograph signing with Carl Weathers, a.k.a Apollo Creed in Cherry Hill, then across the bridge to Philadelphia itself.

“We checked out the locations,” he said. “We went to the gym. We went to his apartment.” They went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and those famous steps. They took photographs of everything to keep the memories, including one of Umana in classic Rocky pose.

Later, when Umana saw a 3-D printed model someone posted on a Rocky fan club Facebook page, it got him thinking:

“I was like, ‘I’d like to build Mick’s Gym.’ And my son’s like, ‘Really? That’s going to be hard, Daddy.’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I think I can do it.’ So I got a piece of plywood, and I just started playing around. And, lo and behold, it started coming out good.”

At first, he thought about using brick-pattern paper for the exterior walls.

“I said, ‘Nah, that’s going to look like garbage.”

So he found tiny clay bricks on the internet. He ended up gluing around 5,000 of them — one at a time with a tweezer — to create the gym’s exterior. It was pretty nice but he wasn’t satisfied. So he devised a way to use a sand-like compound to create the mortar in between the little bricks. Then he found mini furnishings for the inside of the gym and ordered them, too. A tiny boxing ring. Mini workout equipment. Posters. And a little Rocky Balboa.

Umana surprised himself.

“I can fix a lot of stuff, so I’m pretty good with my hands, but I never built anything. I’m not a carpenter.”

Now the neophyte craftsman was on a roll. With the photos he took in Philly as guides, he moved on to Rocky’s rowhouse, then a smaller version of the gym. And then the pièce de résistance: the Art Museum and those Rocky steps.

“I even made the meat!” Umana said, referring to the side of beef Rocky used to spar with in the first movie, which he fashioned from a dog bone.

But there were days, he admits, “I was ready to throw in the towel.” Then his wife, Laura, would tell him. “‘You can’t quit now. Look how far you’ve come.’”

“She’s my Adrian,” Umana said. “Without her, forget about it.”

He and his wife, now a business comptroller, met in junior high school in Queens. Like Adrian, Umana says she has seen him through a lot over the years. Like Rocky, he wasn’t a quitter, and that made the difference.

But when the first Rocky movie came out, Umana was a kid without direction.

“I was a street kid, to be honest with you,” he said. “I didn’t have a good upbringing, and I would hang out in the park. I dropped out of school at 16.” He went to work instead.

The middle child of five, home life wasn’t good. His father was a compulsive gambler and violently abusive. When he was 18 and his mother could take no more, she fled the home with his sisters. Joey stayed behind to be with Laura while caring for his little brother, their father and the house. A few months later, the father died by suicide in Umana’s arms.

But Joey Umana had what real fighters call heart. He and Laura went on to make a good life, a family. His favorite Rocky movie is Rocky III, especially the part when Adrian confronts a faltering Rocky, and tells him, “There’s nothing wrong with being afraid.”

To Umana, the real beauty of Rocky is that it’s a love story.

“In the end, life isn’t a movie,” he said. “Me and my wife struggled for everything. We persevered.”

“My life is a Rocky story,” he said.

Umana was psyched to hear about Philly’s first RockyFest, coming Dec. 3 to 8. The Philadelphia Visitor Center is sponsoring a slew of events celebrating the 48th anniversary of the release of the first Rocky. The Long Island superfan would love if somehow Stallone himself heard of his efforts. “From your mouth to God’s hand!

But his achievements are rewards unto themselves. Lots of nights, he’ll go in and check on his creations. “I like playing with the lights.” And he’s not done. He’s already thinking about creating a model of the Italian Stallion’s cabin in Russia from Rocky IV.

There’s just one problem, he said, chuckling:

“I’m running out of space in my Rocky Room.”