EMILE GRIFFITH

N.Y. TIMES

It was the night of March 24, 1962, a nationally televised welterweight title fight at Madison Square Garden between Emile Griffith and Benny Paret, known as Kid. Griffith was seeking to recapture the crown he had once taken from Paret and then lost back to him.

But this was more than a third encounter for a boxing title. A different kind of tension hung in the Garden air, fed by whispered rumors and an open taunt by Paret, a brash Cuban who at the weigh-in had referred to Griffith as gay, using the Spanish epithet “maricón.” In boxing circles, Griffith had been rumored to be gay, and Paret seized on that to needle him at the weigh-in for their third fight.       

Fighters squaring off always challenge each other’s boxing prowess, but in the macho world of the ring, and in the taboo-laden world of 1962, Paret had made it personal, challenging Griffith’s manhood.

 

   Griffith wanted to attack Paret on the spot, but [his trainer, Gil Clancy] held him back and told him to save it for the ring. “Anytime you’re inside with this guy, you’ve got to punch until he either falls or grabs you or the referee stops you,” Clancy recalled telling him, as quoted in the book “In the Corner” by Dave Anderson, a former sports columnist for The New York Times.    

 

On a Saturday night about 7,500 fans — not a bad crowd for a televised bout in those years — had trooped to the Garden, then at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street, to watch the fight through a haze of cigarette and cigar smoke. By the 12th round of a scheduled 15, Griffith and Paret were still standing. But in the 12th, Griffith pinned Paret into a corner and let fly a whirlwind of blows to the head.

Griffith delivered 17 punches in five seconds with no response from Paret, according to Griffith’s trainer, Gil Clancy, who counted them up from television replays. Griffith may have punched Paret at least two dozen times in that salvo.

At last the referee stepped in, and Paret collapsed with blood clots in his brain.

“I hope he isn’t hurt,” Griffith was quoted saying in his dressing room afterward. “I pray to God — I say from my heart — he’s all right.”

Paret died 10 days later at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan.

 

Paret’s death brought an inquiry by the New York State Athletic Commission, which absolved the referee, Ruby Goldstein, for his delay in stopping the fight.

Griffith, who had batted away rumors about his sexual orientation for years, survived a beating outside a gay bar in Times Square in 1992 and later acknowledged an attraction to men, died on Tuesday in Hempstead, N.Y., his boxing earnings and his memory long gone. He was 75.

The cause was kidney failure and complications of dementia, said Ron Ross, the author of “Nine ... Ten ... and Out! The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith,” published in 2008.

 

.



Larry Morris/The New York Times                               Emile Griffith, shown in 1966            

 

 

Griffith won the welterweight title three times and the middleweight title twice and briefly held the newly created junior middleweight title. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990. But he was most remembered for the death of Paret. It followed him for the rest of his life.




Robert Maxwell/USA Network

Later in life, Griffith, said he liked both men and women

 

 

Over the years, the questions concerning Griffith’s long-rumored homosexuality kept surfacing.

“I will dance with anybody,” Griffith told Sports Illustrated in 2005. “I’ve chased men and women. I like men and women both.” 

That same year, he spoke to Bob Herbert, then a columnist for The Times.

“I asked Mr. Griffith if he was gay, and he told me no,” Mr. Herbert wrote. “But he looked as if he wanted to say more. He told me he had struggled his entire life with his sexuality, and agonized over what he could say about it. He said he knew it was impossible in the early 1960s for an athlete in an ultramacho sport like boxing to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gay.’

“But after all these years, he wanted to tell the truth,” Mr. Herbert went on. “He’d had relations, he said, with men and women. He no longer wanted to hide.” 

 

 Griffith said he was tentative in the ring after the death of Paret.

“After Paret, I never wanted to hurt a guy again,” Sports Illustrated quoted him saying in 2005. “I was so scared to hit someone, I was always holding back.”

In “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” a 2005 Dan Klores-Ron Berger documentary film about his life, Griffith embraces Paret’s son, Benny Jr.

“I didn’t want to kill no one,” Griffith told him. “But things happen.”