“Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story”
Tonight at 9 on USA
(three stars)
HAD six-time boxing champ Emile Griffith been fighting today instead of the 1950s and ’60s, he would have been yet another bazillionaire boxer.
And the tragic championship rematch that ended in the death of his opponent, Benny “Kid” Paret, an illiterate young fighter from Cuba, would never have been allowed to become a death match.
But they were fighting way back then, and way back then – for boxers, at least – never seemed to end well.
“Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” by Dan Klores, a public relations mogul/filmmaker/playwright, and his partner, Ron Berger, tells the story of a sport gone terribly wrong.
With astounding archival footage of the 1962 fight that ended with Paret’s death to contemporary interviews with Griffith and his family – as well as with the son and widow of Paret – “Ring” tells the story not just of that match, but of the lives of two men who were fated to be identified with each other forever.
Griffith, a 15-year-old kid from a poor family in the Virgin Islands, was living in New York when he got a job in the garment district.
For some reason, the kid very quickly became a hat designer. (Yes, a hat designer.)
As soon as he took his shirt off one hot day in the hat factory, the owners saw his astounding build and somehow got him trained as a boxer. He had, after all, a 26-inch waist and a 44-inch shoulder span.
A natural, Griffith won the Golden Gloves (he lied about his age). By the time Griffith met Paret – a married Cuban exile with one son – in the ring eight years later, rumors were already flying around the boxing world about Griffith’s sexuality.
During the weigh-in before their rematch, Paret is said to have whispered “maricon” (a Spanish sexual slur) in his opponent’s ear, which sent Griffith into a rage.
In the ring, an enraged Griffith was unstoppable and Paret, 24, took a savage beating before the referee stepped in. Carried unconscious from the ring, Paret died 10 days later in the hospital.
The death was front-page news for weeks because the fight had been on national TV. It quickly became a scandal, complete with legislative hearings and calls for boxing to be banned.
What hasn’t been told of this story up until now is Paret’s wife, Lucy, revealing to the filmmakers that Paret told her the day of the match that he wasn’t feeling well enough to fight, but that his manager, Manuel Alfaro, had already been paid and wouldn’t consider canceling the match.
Not exactly a concerned type, Alfaro coarsely remarked after Paret’s death that now he’d have to go “find another boy” to replace him.
Griffith was devastated by the death. He continued to box, but he was never the same.
The story comes full circle in 1992 when Griffith – by then long-retired from the ring – was beaten and nearly died walking out of a Times Square gay bar.
He lives today in Hempstead, N.Y., with an “adopted son,” a former inmate from the prison where Griffith worked as a guard after retirement.
“Ring” is as much a story of the time as it is a sports movie – or even a cautionary tale of closet-gay peril. And it’s compelling as all three.