Then, with an unimaginable speed, it ended. The great fighters retired or, worse, kept fighting after their skills had eroded. Television’s romance with the sport resulted in a series of financially rocky divorces. Louis and Marciano were replaced by lesser men who were only willing to risk their titles against still-lesser boxers. Even worse, a series of exposés and criminal investigations revealed boxing’s hideous underbelly of violent mobsters, fixed fights, heartless exploitation, and battered fighters.
The problems of the sport were years in the making, but they crystallized before a national television audience in Madison Square Garden on the night of Saturday, March 24, 1962. That evening, ABC’s The Fight of the Week pitted Cuban Benny “the Kid” Paret against Virgin Islander Emile Griffith for the welterweight championship. The two had battled for the title twice before, Griffith winning the first in a knockout and Paret taking the second in a close decision. There was also bad blood between them. At the morning weigh-in, when Griffith stripped to his underwear and stepped on the scale, the Spanish-speaking Paret moved in close and grabbed Griffith’s ass, whispering, “Hey maricón [faggot], I’m going to get you and your husband.”11
That word—maricón, which Gilbert Rogin of Sports Illustrated called “the most vulgar epithet in that violent idiom”—and the touch enraged Griffith. His high-pitched voice, tight clothes, and former career as a hat designer had started rumors that he was gay. He jerked away from Paret’s touch, telling him to “shut up” and to keep his hands off him or he would fight him then and there.
In the early rounds, the fight was close, but by the twelfth Griffith staggered Paret with several devastating blows. The next seconds were unquestionably the most violent in recorded boxing history. Punching “faster than most observers could count,” as Robert L. Teague of the New York Times wrote, Griffith whaled on Paret, landing punch after punch with deadly force. He connected six or seven times with right uppercuts to the point of the chin, and then landed more lefts and rights to Paret’s face and temples. In just a matter of seconds, Teague thought that Griffith landed twenty-five unanswered punches. It might have been more, but the exact number hardly mattered. Paret was unconscious, entangled in the corner ropes, well before referee Ruby Goldstein stepped between the two boxers.12
As Goldstein pulled Griffith away from Paret, the Cuban slowly slid from the corner ropes to the canvas. Ringside observer Norman Mailer later wrote that he sensed death in the air as Paret gave an unconscious half-smile and then fell “more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on its end and slides second by second into its grave.”13
The bout ended, and the ring swarmed with activity. The senior ringside physician called for a stretcher while TV announcer Don Dunphy scrambled into the ring to get a statement from Emile. After saying how happy he was to regain the title, Griffith added, “I hope Paret is feeling very good.” Ignoring the chaos in the ring, Dunphy decided that the time was right to unveil ABC’s newly developed slow-motion replay system. In nightmarish slow motion, with Emile narrating his brutal beating of Benny, the last conscious seconds of Paret’s life were replayed, the man who beat him to death providing the color. All Griffith could do was describe inarticulately how he had killed his opponent.14
On April 3, ten days after the fight, Paret died without ever regaining consciousness. His death introduced a new vocabulary into the sport. Phrases like “traumatic brain injury” and “subdural hemorrhage” and “edema” sounded like a foreign language to boxing fans but reflected the sweet science’s new reality.15
The horrible end of the Griffith-Paret fight had both immediate and longer-range consequences. While Paret was still in a coma, journalists and politicians began debating the future of a sport “where the object is to knock an opponent loose from his senses.” In the days after the match, politicians demanded that New York governor Nelson Rockefeller do something—form a commission, ban the sport, or at least speak out against it. Ultimately, the state legislature formed a committee to investigate whether prizefighting should be abolished altogether.16