How bad are things in New York City right now? So bad that Sylvester Stallone had his daughters take self-defense training from Navy SEALS before they moved to the Rotten Apple. The training was meant to help them keep themselves safe while in the city, which is now known among many for its sky-high levels of violent and property crime.
As background, Stallone has three daughters: Sophia, 27, Sistine, 25, and Scarlet, 21. He also has two sons, Sage and Seargeoh. It was the two older daughters, Sophia and Sistine, who had to take the Navy SEAL-led self-defense training before moving to the big city.
Speaking to the New York Post about the long and difficult training class, Sistine said that the training was more difficult than the cameras made it appear when filming for “The Family Stallone,” the family’s reality TV show. She said, “It was about six hours we were in those woods. They made it a cute little montage, Sophia and I got our a–es whooped by these guys, they were the real deal.”
Continuing, Sistine went on to add that she was “not surprised my dad put us through something like” the training. Explaining why, she said it was more or less expected “because our entire life we grew up with him doing these sort of military-esque self-defense trainings.”
Agreeing with her younger sister, Sophia said, “It was a rigorous routine.” She then joked about the meal they had to eat before the training, saying, “it was every day at 6 a.m. he would make us eat eggs with ketchup, for some reason that combination was like an elite combination.” She also agreed that the training was nothing atypical for their family, saying their childhoods were defined by “a lot of sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, clean and jerks, it was golfing, it was pool table, it was shot put …”
Stallone, for his part, chimed in and explained the reasoning behind one of the trainings they did, which was chasing a chicken. He said, “Chasing a chicken sounds like a fun game. You have to have speed, patience, agility and understand that you’re going to be beaten by something that weighs three pounds and has a beak.”
Sistine, speaking about the training added, “That is deceivingly hard. I went in there a little cocky, no pun intended. I got beat by the chicken.” She also said, speaking about whether her dad will ever get used to his daughters living in New York, “I don’t think he’ll ever be less nervous. He’s like a classic, overprotective dad. Three daughters at an age where, you know, we’re kind of all over the place and we’re out and about.”
Hopefully the training helps keep the girls safe, particularly by keeping them entirely out of trouble in New York City as crime continues to swamp the city and turn America’s once-finest city into a less and less pleasant place to live for its law-abiding citizens.
Featured image credit: By Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33029561
"*" indicates required fields