1962: Emile Griffith fought Benny “the Kid” Paret at Madison Square Garden for the welterweight boxing title. Both were Caribbean-born fighters, but that’s about all they had in common. One of them was privately bisexual. And only one of them would live to fight again.
1938: Emile Griffith was born in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. His mother emigrated to the United States.
By the 1950s, teenage Emile reconnected with his estranged mother in New York City. He took a job in a hat factory, which he enjoyed. It was there that the shop owner encouraged him to give boxing a try.
Emile took to the sport and rose through the ranks. He went 22-2, even though he failed to knock out his opponents and often won instead on points. His manager explained that winning bouts decisively would help him financially. Increased earnings would help Emile bring his poor siblings from the Caribbean to America. That motivated him to win by knockout.
He won a Golden Gloves championship. That set him up for a title fight.
A Bronx phenom of Cuban descent, Benny “the Kid” Paret was the welterweight champion, and he took on Emile Griffith in the ring for the first time in 1961. In that meeting, Griffith KO’d him in the Round 13. Emile took the title from him.
In their rematch later that same year, Paret retook the title. That set up a third, costly bout.
March 1962: When they met publicly before their final contest, Paret made a disparaging remark about Griffith, calling him the Spanish slur word for homosexual - maricon. Most observers assumed the insult was just trash talk, albeit far harsher than the norm. Sports reporters couldn’t print the word, but they saw Griffith’s vitriolic reaction to it.
What the public didn’t know was that Griffith was privately bisexual. He regularly visited gay nightclubs in New York City in the early Sixties - a time when being gay was taboo, especially for black men, and was even deemed a mental health disorder. Gay Manhattanites knew of the bisexual boxer, though, and they rooted for him.
His lifestyle was rumored about in the boxing world, too. They knew of his hobby of creating fashionable women’s hats, a practice he learned at the hat factory, but no one spoke openly about him being gay.
That was why Paret’s taunt angered Griffith. He hated the slur, which spurred him in the ring.
Their last fight at New York’s Madison Square Garden, which aired live on TV, went twelve rounds. In the final round, Emile repeatedly pummeled Paret. He took a flurry of blows to the head, even after he’d gone limp. The fight was stopped when Paret lost consciousness.
The Cuban boxer never woke up. He was hospitalized and remained in a coma for ten days. Then Benny “the Kid” Paret died.
Griffith was never blamed for Paret’s death. Boxing professionals pointed fingers instead at the man’s greedy manager. Paret had been in the ring a few short months earlier and had taken equally brutal beatings at that time without a full recovery period. Besides, as people said at the time, boxing was a violent sport that always held the potential for death.
Even so, Emile Griffith harbored guilt for the rest of his life.
That didn’t stop his career, however. He lost the welterweight title that year but reclaimed it again in 1963. In total, Griffith won five world championships; three times as a welterweight and twice as a middleweight. His career won-loss record was 85-24 with two no decisions.
1971: Griffith retired from boxing, moved to New Jersey, and became a Juvenile Corrections Officer. He later came out publicly as bisexual, and always regretted his match against Benny Paret. He died in 2013.
ALSO:
Champion, an opera based on Emile Griffith’s life, was performed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera ten years after his death in 2023.
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