"As long as he was beating the s- out of people, it gave lie to the slander. to be homosexual and a world champion," says Sugar. that teenager he always lets use his car and calls his "son." But what's this all add up to? It can't be that, not in 1962 or even 2002: a prizefighter, a champion, a limp wrist with a knockout punch? It's the ultimate contradiction, the perfect smoke, so dense that Emile himself can't see through it. those young Latino males who seem to appear wherever he does. those pants as tight as tape on his broomstick legs. those Sunday mornings singing tenor at St.
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They've started adding things up: that high-pitched singsong voice. So sweet-maybe too sweet, the men in the city's boxing gyms have begun to whisper. Running up $100 candy bills in the gift shop at the Concord Hotel, where he trains in the Catskills, doling out gum and grins to everyone, falling asleep with a wad of Bazooka in his mouth that Albert has to scoop out. A champ but still a child, leaping into the referee's arms to hug him the first time he takes the title from Paret and then, when the astonished ref fumbles him onto the canvas, doing a backward somersault. He's 23 now, living with Mama and all her brood in the five-bedroom house he's just bought in Queens Village. A year later he was the national Gloves champ. Two months after he laced up the 11th-grade dropout, the kid was a finalist in the New York Golden Gloves. Albert took him to Clancy, a trainer with a growing reputation at a gym on 28th Street. The young man didn't have the lust for hurting people-would've been happy hauling boxes of bonnets to Macy's and Gimbel's all his life-but his body was a destiny that had to be fulfilled. "Shoulders," says boxing writer Bert Sugar, "that you could serve dinner for six on." Albert had never seen anything like it: a 26-inch waist fanning out to 44-inch shoulders, all rippling with muscle. Griffith, 24, a Virgin Islander who never wished to be a fighter, who just happened to ask if he could take off his shirt on a sweaty summer day as a teenager working in a hat factory on West 39th Street owned by a former amateur boxer named Howie Albert. Paret, 25, the sugarcane cutter from Cuba who carries his two-year-old son, Benny Jr., everywhere on his shoulders, fighting in what he has decided will be his last prizefight. They've played basketball together in the neighborhood they share in the shadows of the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan. In the center of the smoke crouch two black immigrants from the islands. It's 1962, when a handful of writers-Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal-are virtually the only people known to be gay in all of America even Liberace files a lawsuit against those implying he's a homosexual, for fear of what he'll lose. It'll be 15 years before you retire with more championship rounds under your belt than anyone in boxing history: 51 more than Sugar Ray Robinson, 69 more than Muhammad Ali. You're approaching a weigh-in scale in front of a couple of dozen people, mostly writers and photographers. You're naked again, except for underwear and socks.
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So the smoke may only grow thicker.īut I should have clothes on! Sorry, Champ. You'd think, under all those klieg lights and reading lamps, that the smoke's about to clear. Later in the year a biography of Griffith by Ron Ross, also addressing the issue of the fighter's sexuality, is expected to appear, and the rights to produce a feature film on the big screen have been sold.
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On April 20 a striking documentary about Emile Griffith- Ring of Fire, directed and produced by Dan Klores with Ron Berger and being promoted on buses all over New York City-will premiere on USA Network at 9 p.m.