I vividly remember the first time I met Emile Griffith. I had stumbled into the old Jack Miller’s Pub on Academy Street in Jersey City with a friend for a cold brew one summer afternoon about 20 years ago or so.
I rarely visited that little out of the way establishment, except for the rare appearances doing the crawl back home after marching in the Jersey City St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Then, it was a necessity. Other times, I felt like a fish out of water.
But on this one summer afternoon, a friend convinced me to go to Jack Miller’s with him. He regularly visited the place, but he wanted to make sure that I went there on this certain day.
“I want to introduce you to a legend,” my friend said.
I thought I was going to be acquainted with some drinking crony who hung out at the old-time joint. I never expected to meet one of the most famous names in the history of boxing.
“Jim, say ‘Hi’ to the champ,” my friend said. “Jim, this is Emile Griffith. Have you ever heard of him?”
I think my friend was being a little sarcastic, because as a sports junkie and a beloved historian of all sports, I definitely knew who Emile Griffith was. He was one of only three boxers to hold both the welterweight and middleweight championships of the world. He had a career that spanned an amazing 20 years. He fought for either the middleweight or welterweight titles an incredible 21 times – a record that still stands.
So, yes, when my friend said that he was introducing me to a legend, he sure was. Emile Griffith was indeed a legend.
But there was also another moment, one blemish on Griffith’s incredible boxing ledger that also made him legendary.
On March 24, 1962, Griffith caused the first live man-to-man killing that was ever broadcast on national television – a full 18 months before Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the hollows of a Dallas prison after Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
On that fateful day in March, 1962, Griffith fought Benny “Kid” Paret in the welterweight championship of the world bout in Madison Square Garden. Just six months prior, Paret had defeated Griffith in a 15-round decision to win the welterweight crown. This was Griffith’s chance to gain revenge. Ironically, when Griffith first won the welterweight title in 1961, he had knocked out Paret in Miami Beach.
So the March, 1962 bout was a long-awaited rubber match. Both fighters had one win against each other. This fight would determine who was truly the better fighter.
At the time, boxing was a highly popular sport on television. Every week, there was a card televised, called “Gillette’s Cavalcade of Champions: Friday Night Fights,” with famed announcer Don Dunphy on the mike. The boxing cards were watched on a regular basis through the 1950s, into the 1960s, almost as widely viewed as Milton Berle, “I Love Lucy” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
The third fight between Griffith and Paret was so anticipated that the producers decide to air the fight on a Saturday night, with the attempt of drawing a larger audience, trying to steal Nielsen rating points away from popular variety shows like “The Hollywood Palace” and “The Lawrence Welk Show.”
So the fight was staged before a nationally televised audience in prime time.
There was obviously no love lost between the two combatants, especially after two prior grueling fights. But things got even heated before the third fight, when Paret took a jab at Griffith’s sexual preference in a pre-fight press conference, calling Griffith a “maricon,” a word origin that the Virgin Island-born Griffith knew.
There had been some rumors about Griffith’s sexual preference. Because he had been spotted in Manhattan gay clubs and because he had a propensity to dress flamboyantly, including wearing high feminine-looking hats that he designed himself, Griffith was labeled as being gay – although he never once officially came out of the closet.
But when Paret called Griffith a “maricon,” a slang Spanish word for a gay man, at the press conference, Griffith was incensed and decided to take his anger out in the ring.
Little did Griffith know that the night would change his life – and the world of professional sports – forever.
In the 12th round, Griffith pounded Paret unmercifully, over and over, in perhaps the most brutal beating ever witnessed in the ring. Allegedly, Griffith muttered the words, “Who’s a maricon now? Who’s your maricon now?” with every piercing blow. Referee Ruby Goldstein, who never worked another fight again, didn’t stop the beating. He allowed Griffith to deliver blow after undefended blow in the corner, while Paret lay defenseless against the ropes.
Griffith delivered 18 punches in a span of six seconds, before Goldstein finally stopped the fight. Paret slumped into the corner and was soon rushed to a hospital in a coma that he never recovered from. Paret died 10 days later.
The brutal fight changed boxing forever. It was banned from live television for more than a decade. Stricter regulations were placed upon referees stepping in and stopping bouts when one fighter appeared defenseless.
Griffith was never the same fighter again. In fact, the term “killer instinct” was rarely used around Griffith because of the fatal fight. He did go on to have a brilliant career, holding six different welterweight and middleweight belts, two of which graced the walls of Jack Miller’s Pub in Jersey City, where I met “the champ” 20 years ago.
When he was a regular at Jack Miller’s, either as a patron or as a bartender, Emile Griffith was one of the nicest, sweetest guys in the world. He was cheery, fun-loving, ready to tell a joke and be one of the guys. The rumors of his sexual preference always hovered about, but it didn’t change Griffith one iota.
As it turned out, Griffith called Hudson County his home for more than 25 years. Soon after winning the world middleweight title in 1965, Griffith lived in a luxury apartment on Boulevard East in Weehawken with his wife, Sadie, and where he remained for several years, even after the couple divorced.
Griffith loved being with the patrons at Jack Miller’s and considered the owner to be one of his closest friends, someone he could rely upon, after being almost totally forgotten by people in the fight game, although he was training former lightweight champion Juan LaPorte out of Gleason’s Gym in New York for a while.
Griffith didn’t mind talking about boxing, but he never answered questions about that fateful night in 1962.
“Some things are too painful to talk about, Jimmy,” he said to me when I asked to do an interview with him about 15 years ago. “I don’t want to go back there.”
In later years, Griffith worked as a corrections officer at the Hudson County Youth House in Secaucus. It’s there where he met Luis Rodrigo, who was an inmate at the correctional youth facility at the time. In later years, Griffith legally adopted Rodrigo as his son and the two live together now in Hempstead, Long Island.
The years haven’t been kind to Griffith. Now 67 years old, he suffers from a form of dementia and has very little money. Rodrigo and Griffith live in a one-room apartment, along with another young man.
On Wednesday night, the USA Network aired a documentary, entitled “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story.” The show, which was produced and directed by filmmaker Dan Klores,
The film was very well done and documented, but it totally forgot about Griffith’s quarter-century in Hudson County.
But Griffith, who has been catapulted back into the spotlight recently because of the documentary, will be remembered locally as a fun-loving and wonderfully spirited man who had to live with the daily torment of being the man who inflicted the blows that killed Benny “Kid” Paret in the ring 43 years ago.
At the end of the documentary, there was a touching moment where Griffith met Paret’s son, Benny, Jr., in Central Park. The two men embraced, cried and shared stories. Paret, Jr. told Griffith that he held no ill will toward Griffith for what happened that night in 1962.
Maybe now, a battered senior citizen can finally put the demons that have haunted him for four decades to rest. We can only hope so. Emile Griffith, the man who I met and called “Champ” every time I saw him, deserves to have those demons removed.