The Haunting of Emile Griffith

April 14, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The New York Times

The Haunting of Emile Griffith
By BOB HERBERT

The ex-champ was a few inches shorter than I'd imagined, and he had put on a few pounds. At age 67, all of his hair and some of his memory were gone. Absorbing blows over several years from the hardest-hitting people on the planet can cause confusion.

But he looked good. He smiled easily and was playful as a child. We went to lunch, and he told me some things he'd been reluctant to say for decades.

I had always thought of Emile Griffith as a man who had gone through most of his life dragging two enormous weights behind him. Although a five-time world champion, he is most widely known for a ferocious barrage of punches that he unleashed in the 12th round of a televised fight on a Saturday night in March 1962.

At the other end of those punches was the welterweight champion, a Cuban fighter named Benny (Kid) Paret. Paret was helpless, trapped on the ropes in a corner of the ring at the old Madison Square Garden in such a way that his body could not fall to the canvas. Griffith punched and punched, the blows landing with tremendous force, one after another after another, on Paret's unprotected head.

When the referee finally pulled Griffith away, Paret slid slowly to the canvas. I was a teenager watching this on television. It was obvious that Paret was in desperate trouble. His body seemed utterly lifeless. They carried him out on a stretcher, and he died 10 days later.

An extraordinary new documentary, "Ring of Fire," by the filmmaker Dan Klores and his co-director Ron Berger, tells the story of Emile Griffith and this fight that has never stopped haunting him. The film makes it clear that you can't explore that tragic fight and its aftermath without talking about Mr. Griffith's feelings about his own sexuality, which is the other torment he's had to haul around all these years.

One of the things I thought after watching the film was how far we haven't come in 43 years.

The fight on March 24, 1962, was the third between Griffith and Paret. They had split the first two bouts. Over that period Paret had repeatedly taunted Griffith, who had been a hat designer in the Manhattan garment district and was known to frequent gay clubs. At weigh-ins Paret would mock Griffith, and he called him a "maricón," a Spanish word guaranteed to infuriate.

It still infuriates. At lunch, Mr. Griffith's smile faded as he recalled the taunts he took from Paret. "I got tired," he said, "of people calling me faggot."

He said again, as he has many times, that he was sorry Paret had died. But he added: "He called me a name. ... So I did what I had to do."

How much has changed? As a society, we're still painfully twisted when it comes to homosexuality. A couple of guys holding hands. ... Women kissing on the mouth. ...

We know from the ugly and irrational fury over the gay marriage issue, and the silly "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the armed forces, that there are still tremendous reservoirs of fear and loathing ready to be unloaded on gay men and women who'd like nothing more than to live their lives freely, honestly and openly. Things are not as bad as they were in 1962, but they're not good.

Media reports have applauded the tolerance toward gays that has supposedly developed over the past several years, but I think much of that tolerance is wafer-thin. Millions of gay or bisexual Americans still live their lives locked inside the protective cloak of a falsehood - afraid, for very good reasons, to come out.

A poll conducted for NBC Universal's USA Network, which will be showing "Ring of Fire," found that 44 percent of the respondents believed that "homosexual behavior is a sin." A third said society should not accept homosexuality as a way of life, and 14 percent believed gay athletes should not be permitted to play team sports.

I asked Mr. Griffith if he was gay, and he told me no. 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 1960's 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. He'd had relations, he said, with men and women. He no longer wanted to hide. He hoped to ride this year in New York's Gay Pride Parade.

He said he hadn't meant to kill Benny Paret, "but what he said touched something inside."

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

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