Junior, the Kid, the Fight
By DAN KLORESMARCH 31, 2012
Fifty years later. If you are Lucy Paret, though, the impoverished widow of Benny, a two-time welterweight champion of the world, you’re hardly calling this an anniversary. Fifty years ago, you decided to stay home in your Bronx apartment building the night your 25-year-old husband was pummeled to death — March 24, 1962 — by the challenger Emile Griffith, a former champion, on live television, an ABC “Friday Night Fights” special.
It’s been a hard life. One child, the one with whom you were pregnant that night, sits in a Florida Panhandle state penitentiary, more than likely for the rest of his days. The other, Benny Jr., 52, handsome and personable, is beginning to find himself. The boxer’s pension? Never happened. Life insurance? Ten grand come and gone. Sitting in your cramped Miami studio apartment — bed, bath, closet, kitchen, coffee cup — retired after years as a cashier in the strip mall, once a lovely, sexy, proud dancer, you approach every March with dread. Fifty years since the neighbor ran to her door, knocked and said, “Senora, senora, algo malo ha ocurrido.” (“Something bad has happened.”) Benny was hurt, clobbered, taken from the Madison Square Garden ring by stretcher.
Fifty years since the referee, Ruby Goldstein, having just been lionized on “The Ed Sullivan Show” for stopping a bout before a fighter got “really hurt,” choked. That night, he watched, too, as did millions of Americans — in the lower left-hand corner of the television screen, the black-and-white blows that never stopped as Griffith crushed Benny. Even the gangsters, the jocks and the movie stars at ringside were thinking this might have gone too far. The smelling salts failed, too.
The ambulance from St. Luke’s drove up. The reporters feigned sensitivity. The 10-day coma, the funeral home, the Cuban mother-in-law arrived, courtesy of Pan Am. She detested you as a light-skinned Puerto Rican, wondered about the purse, went back home, and you never heard a word from her again. Fifty years of struggle, of never feeling good enough about yourself to marry again, of daily routines taking their toll, of occasional visits to his grave in the Bronx.
He entered the ring that night, battered four months earlier by a human bulldozer — the bigger, stronger, tougher middleweight champion Gene Fullmer, who rocked him so badly that the Kid (that’s what they called Benny) should never have been allowed back in the ring. But the New York State Athletic commissioners and the doctors said he would be fine.
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The Kid was illiterate in two languages. He had arrived from Cuba a few years before Fidel Castro took over. His family stayed behind, so he was left trusting his older, wiser, charismatic manager, Manuel Alfaro, a successful entrepreneur and nightclub owner. They had a plan. After he beat Griffith, Benny would have a few additional title defenses, then he could own a butcher shop on the Grand Concourse. It would mean success.
Lucy? “Nah. Not for me.” She never liked the fight game. She didn’t get a thrill watching him get whipped. Manuel, however, had all the answers. He had most of the $35,000 purse, too. He had Benny’s ear, mind and body. She wouldn’t go to the Garden that night. She would sit at home with the baby, while Adolfo played in her belly.
Emile Griffith grew up as a man-child at a boys’ detention home in the Virgin Islands. With a body by David, 28-inch waist, 46-inch chest, 146 pounds, he spent his adolescence and early teenage years standing in brutal heat, barefoot on rocks, forced to hold water buckets in each arm, punished for whatever sadistic thoughts entered the minds of authority figures, thirsty for escape. At night, the men or bigger boys came to him. They took.
Soon his Mommy moved to New York, the immigrant’s dream, but left the children behind. The oldest of eight, Emile got the call first a year later to come north, where he played baseball, swam, defended the weak on the Harlem streets. A grade-school dropout, with a high, delightful, innocent singsong voice, he started moving racks part time in the Garment Center. Emile was “discovered” by two young men, the Irish trainer Gil Clancy, a World War II veteran with a master’s degree in education, and the Jewish garmento Howie Albert, a big-time personality and ex-fighter. “It was the only partnership in history,” Clancy quipped, “where the Irishman and Jew teamed up, and the mick had the brains.”
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The referee Ruby Goldstein and millions in front of their TVs watched as Emile Griffith pummeled Benny Paret. Credit Associated Press
Emile became a Golden Gloves legend. He climbed the professional ranks quickly. The myths and narratives created a clean biography: he was a hat designer, creative, and he loved blonde Scandinavian beauties. Two facts were straight, though. He was a vicious counterpuncher, and after each victory, he honored Mommy’s dream by moving up one of his siblings. Soon, he bought a house in the Hollis section of Queens, for the entire clan.
Clancy kept his prodigy away from the gangsters Blinky Palermo and Frankie Carbo, who had “owned” a bunch of previous champions, including Don Jordan, the welterweight king Paret first beat in 1960 to become the world champion. Soon after, however, Emile took the crown from Benny, who then won it back, setting up the rubber match on March 24, 1962.
Emile’s escape became the gay bars around Times Square, private places of peace, affection and sex.
“Where does he go?” Clancy said. “I don’t know,” his brother or Albert would reply. “Has anyone seen my Junior?” Mommy said.
One friend was shot, crippled for life. Emile cried and cried. The pain made worse with no one to tell.
He got to the weigh-in the day of the fight, not the absurd Don King/Bob Arum sideshow of today. Just a bunch of scribes from the city’s seven daily newspapers and a few still photographers. Benny wanted an edge. Manuel gave it to him. The Kid patted Emile on the behind and drew his lips close to Emile’s ear. He whispered a gay slur in Spanish, “Maricón, maricón.” Emile, shaken, looked around, hoping no one else had heard. He then lunged at Paret, his tormentor. Their handlers jumped in to break it up.
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Clancy spent the afternoon walking Emile, 24, around the long Manhattan blocks between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. His mission was to calm down the man-child so he would be ready to beat Paret senseless. He certainly wasn’t going to address the humiliating insult. No matter, Benny got his edge. In the sixth round, he shocked the Garden crowd, flattening Mommy’s favorite, Junior.
At home, boys and men, fathers, uncles and granddaddies sat glued to their 18-inch Admiral TVs as they did every weekend night. “Friday Night Fights,” their moment to be together. It was the 1960s, and pop psychologists hadn’t yet come up with terms like bonding and sharing.
For 12-year-olds like me, who liked “the fights,” the routine was an early lesson in deception and love. The voice of the announcer Don Dunphy, accompanied by the sponsor’s Madison Avenue jingle, began at 10 p.m. sharp, which was either too late to stay up or meant it was the end of the workweek for your struggling father who simply wanted to watch the fight alone. A chair, an ottoman, a Piels and red pistachios. “Go to sleep,” was the order. You went to the bed, turned out the lights, got under the sheets, told your little brother if he said a word, he was finished, and turned the 12-inch on low, getting ready to watch, praying that they didn’t hear, rush in and turn the TV off.
The unconscious Benny Paret was taken from Madison Square Garden on a stretcher. He died after 10 days in a coma. Credit Associated Press
Every week, I kept a running list in pencil, on loose-leaf paper: the date and site, who fought, their weight and the results. I kept score, too, according to the 10-point round system. I was self-taught and hid the evidence between the hardcover books on the manmade shelves, somewhere between Jack London and Quentin Reynolds. I was either too young to recognize that he had to know I was “cheating,” or too needy to understand that he didn’t care that I was trying to reach out to him. What I loved were the combatants. They didn’t leave like the Duke and Furillo and Gilliam. They were tough men: Sugar Ray, Basilio, Paul Pender, Terry Downs, Tiger Jones, Spider Webb, Florentino Fernandez, Luis Rodriguez, Hurricane Carter, Joey Giardello.
Emile fought back. By the 10th and 11th rounds, he took control of the fight. By the 12th, he had killed Benny.
Bottom left-hand corner. He was trapped in the ropes, one arm draped over, the other doing anything to stop the blows: 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, maybe more, all to the head. Benny’s arms stopped moving. So did Goldstein’s legs. Finally, Manuel jumped into the ring. Emile had reclaimed his title.
Every dubious politician worldwide was enraged. Wagner, Rockefeller, the local New York State hacks, the Vatican, the Diet of Japan, British Parliament spewed “abolish the sport.” They succeeded in going home to tell the wife to watch them on TV or to read about them in The New York Times.
Ten days in a coma. Once, while talking to Benny, Lucy felt his hand move. “Maybe,” she said. “God has heard my prayers.” A few months later, she gave birth and moved to Miami, her place in history etched in his tombstone. They became anecdotes.
Eventually, Emile got back in the ring. He won and lost the welterweight and middleweight titles four more times. He fought way too long, even married a woman, which lasted a few months. Joe Frazier was his best man at a lavish affair at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills.
How can you possibly be the same? How can a man endure the trauma of killing another while being told that nothing had changed?
In 1992, 15 years into retirement, he walked out of a gay bar near New York’s Port Authority. Five teenage thugs, one carrying a baseball bat, decided to mug him. They never figured the tipsy old man was a six-time world champion. He fought back and lost. The brain damage, compounded by more than 200 prizefights, was severe. Even then, at 54, Emile got off the pavement, took the subway to Queens, his head battered as if a piñata, bleeding; ribs, jaw and spleen broken. His cries and moans awakened Luis, his lover and “adopted son,” asleep in their basement enclave. Startled, he yelled for Mommy to get up. They took him to Elmhurst General Hospital, where he spent the next four months.
Lucy has been at the side of her two sons, no matter the fault. She has aged with grace and dignity, but with no money, no help, no in-laws, no benefits. She remembers 50 years ago. She can see Benny’s smile, sometimes hear his voice, but there is no touch, no embrace, no comfort in the legend.
Emile no longer worries. He lives in a nursing home in Hempstead, N.Y. Clancy and Albert have died. Only Luis and his biographer and friend Ron Ross visit. His dementia has no cure. Emile fought more championship rounds at Madison Square Garden than any other fighter in history, but he stands alone, naked as the lion that enters the Colosseum.
Dan Klores, a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and playwright, directed “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 1, 2012, on Page SP12 of the New York edition with the headline: Junior, The Kid, The Fight. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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