That Time Martin Kove and Sly Stallone Got In a Bar Fight In Acapulco

Some stories come with a warning label. Martin Kove offered his up with one already attached.

"I got a good one. It won't incriminate me," Kove told Rich, and then he took the show back to a disco in Acapulco, where he and Sylvester Stallone were shooting and where the nights did not always end quietly.

The setup was simple enough. When women approached Stallone at the club and asked him to dance, he almost always said no. Saying yes, as Kove explained it, was how you got yourself into trouble. So the answer was a polite decline, over and over.

One night that decline found the wrong audience.

"I was sitting with him and a guy came up and said, 'What's the matter? You too good to dance with my girl?'" Kove recalled. "All of a sudden there's a fight and it's like we're all fighting."

Not a stare-down. Not a shoving match that fizzles out. An actual fight, in an actual disco, in Acapulco.

"This guy threw a punch," Kove said, still amused by the geography of it. "It's not even good to get into a fight in a disco in Mexico."

What sells the story is not the punch. It is what the security guards had to do next. With the room turning, the club's staff decided the smartest move was to remove the biggest star in the building, physically.

"They had to lift Sly up," Kove said, reaching for the right image. "Like as if you're watching Bruce Springsteen in a concert where he gets handled. So they lifted him up, these security guys, and took him out of the club. We all had to leave the club."

Kove's takeaway was not regret. It was closer to disappointment that the night got cut short.

"To me, it was hysterical, because we would have stayed there and fought," he said. "That's just what we do."

The Rambo references wrote themselves. First blood, plenty of blood, and a group of actors who apparently did not need a script to find a brawl. The difference is that this one did not end with a hero walking away in slow motion. It ended with a movie star being carried out over the crowd like a stage diver, and everyone else being shown the door.

Rich got exactly the tale he was fishing for. Kove delivered it without, by his own accounting, incriminating himself.