I was eight years feeble the night I saw the third and final fight between Emile Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret on national television. My father, who learned how to fight in rural mid-Michigan shortly after its lumbering years, was a fight fan who appreciated skilled fighters and a edifying, glorious fight. That night, my eight-year-old eyes witnessed perhaps the most spectacular knockout I had ever seen; my father saw something else.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Ring of Fire - The Emile Griffith Story! Click Here
My mother was away that night — rare for us — and my father climbed into bed with me after the fight, and held my hand. Both these events were unheard-of. At the time I idea he was trying to comfort me, and maybe he was, but looking succor on it, I am quite positive now that he was trying to comfort himself, to acquire on through my hand to a young life that was precious and could be snuffed out with almost no warning.
“Ring of Fire” follows the surviving fighter, Emile Griffith, into and through his fight career and into a career as a trainer, and then picks him up in the exhibit as a prison guard (or is he retired? ) living a simple and modest life in Queens, Unique York. He was beaten nearly to death in the mid-1990’s, apparently by a gang of homophobes, from which he suffered some aloof but discernible cognitive injure. He takes public transportation “like everybody else,” he says, instead of the limousine he former during the height of his boxing career.
Buy,Download, Or Stream Ring of Fire - The Emile Griffith Story! Click Here
We stare no hint of regret over Griffith’s prove, modest, circumstances. His comments and demeanor throughout the film — he is charmingly candid and unassuming — suggest that he need never have been a fighter at all. Like Ferdinand the Bull, he would have been lisp to continue working in the fashion industry creating something blooming. Fortunately or unfortunately, his employer noticed his exceptionally well-developed body, brought him to a gym, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Paret’s death at his hands has disquieted Griffith these past 43 years, undoubtedly far more than it has shocked me and perhaps millions of others who saw the fight. For years, Griffith imagined, but feared, meeting Paret’s family. Paret’s son, now in his forties, relates his mother’s struggle (she never remarried) to rear and provide for him. The meeting between the two at film’s waste is intelligent and worthy. The young Paret approaches the meeting somberly but with a definite emotional detachment; but when he looks into Griffith’s eyes he realizes that it is the conventional fighter who desperately needs consolation and forgiveness. They are instantly given, and in that instant, the young son who was deprived of his father at the age of two becomes the older man’s emotional caretaker.
Many will glean the fight scenes difficult to peek. However, the tragedy of Griffith-Paret III is only the jumping-off point for this salubrious documentary, which lets the participants and the events direct the yarn. Unlike most Amazon reviewers, I am stingy with my stars, but this cramped gem rates a *****.
Ring of Fire
Reviewed by Richard Arlin (Dick) Stull
JULY 9, 2007 archive - Arete, Sport Literature Association
Primal Plate Tectonics in a Grand Man’s Soul
[Ring of Fire]
On March 24, 1962, I sat in the living room with my dad to notice Gillette’s Friday Night at the Fights on an stale eighteen-inch Zenith sad and white TV. It was a regular ritual. My dad would drink Falstaff beer, we’d discuss the newest rankings in Ring Magazine and explore forward to watching Carlos Ortiz, Kid Gavilan, Jose Torres, Floyd Patterson and Emile Griffith. At a time before instant replay, my father, in his quest for reception perfection, habitually got up during the fights to adjust the long rabbit ears antennae. It drove me crazy because he’d invariably cause a blizzard upright at the important knock-down or knockout. That night, Emile Griffith, an artful, remarkable boxer, fought Benny “Kid”" Paret, a tough Cuban counter-puncher for the welterweight championship live from Madison Square Garden in Current York City. In the twelfth round, Griffith pinned Paret in the corner and unleashed a barrage of punches that left Paret helpless along the ropes. As Griffith continued to pound away with straight suitable hands and gargantuan uppercuts, Paret slumped along the ropes slowly to the canvas. According to one observer, Griffith threw seventeen unanswered punches. My dad never moved to adjust the antennae. The characterize was crystal distinct this time. Paret never regained consciousness and died ten days later.
Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Yarn is a documentary of exclusive power, a fresh day Greek tragedy with individual and cultural twists and contexts that do unforgettable viewing. From the opening scene of the swollen streets of leisurely 1950’s Unusual York City, James Brown’s soulful rendition of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in the background, Ring of Fire has you crooked. The back-stories and subsequent developments surrounding that night in 1962 are told by a incandescent array of Unique York writers and boxing people and like Pete Hamill, Howie Albert, Juan Gonzalez, Jimmy Breslin, Jack Newfield, Neal Gabler, Hank Kaplan, Griffith’s trainer Gil Clancy, boxers Gaspar Oretga, Jose Torres and Lupe Pintor, Ruby Goldstein Jr., Paret’s widow, Lucy, his son, Benny Jr., and, of course, Emile Griffith himself, age 67 at the time of the filming.
Griffith and Paret were immigrants from the Virgin Islands and Cuba, respectively. They grew up in adjacent neighborhoods and had even played basketball together as kids. For the Irish, Italian, Jewish and other immigrant groups of the past, boxing was a plot out of poverty. But the two fighters were on a collision course in more ways than one as they ascended to the top ranks of the welterweight division. Griffith was a celebrated, likable fighter, supremely gifted, who was genuinely respectful to his peers and opponents alike. Paret was a cocky, valorous counter-puncher willing to prefer four punches to land one. Griffith had won the title against Paret the previous year but lost their rematch. The third fight was more than a clash of boxing styles and personalities. Rumors on the street circulated that Griffith was contented. At the weigh-in for their third fight, Paret taunted Griffith with the word ‘maricon.’ Griffith, while never directly confirming or denying his sexual orientation, said ominously in the opening interview for the documentary, “He called me a ‘maricon.’ I knew ‘maricon’ meant faggot. And I wasn’t nobody’s faggot.” During the fight Griffith was curious, focused, lively skillfully, fighting cleverly out of the clinches, beating Paret to the punch from long and short range. Although Paret knocked Griffith down in the sixth round, it was Griffith’s fight. Finally, in a 12th round that was comparatively benign, Griffith caught Paret on the ropes in the corner of the ring. What happened then was described by writer Norman Mailer as Griffith’s honest hand “like a piston-rod unhinged from the crank-case” with the effects of a “ball-bat smashing a pumpkin.” Referee Ruby Goldstein, lauded on the Ed Sullivan Point To because he had the courage to step in and end fights before fighters were permanently damage, inexplicably stood by as Griffith pounded Paret. After finally stepping in to separate the two, Paret, wrote Mailer, “went down like a enormous ship that turns on raze and slides second by second into its grave.”
Paret remained in a coma, never regaining consciousness, and died after ten days. Griffith was inundated with loathe mail. Politicians called to ban boxing. Television, which had become the fresh national medium, had literally shown an execution as mass entertainment.
The documentary also points out the inverted vice bowl of poverty and exploitation of those in the fight game. Paret, who had already suffered broad punishment in his previous fights, was likened by writer Pete Hamill to a car that had been in a smash and could never be the same. His manager, Manny Alfaro had simply customary him for one more substantial payday. Ironically, Griffith, a genuinely likable, respectful, thoughtful, humane human being, never intended to become a boxer. At the age of fifteen, he was working as a hat designer in the garment district when he took his shirt off on a hot day. His boss, noticing his Herculean body, immediately took him to fight trainer Gil Clancy, who taught him how to box.
Griffith was shattered by the death of Paret. He nonetheless continued to fight into the seventies and won five additional world championships. Incredibly, after he retired, he was severely beaten by thugs outside a delighted night-club and sustained brain and memory hurt far worse than he ever had taking blows in the ring. He is cared for by his adopted son, a primitive inmate in a correctional facility where Griffith mature to work. Griffith level-headed has nightmares about the fight.
There are some unforgettable scenes. One, showing Benny Paret Jr. as a toddler playing on the floor with a report of his gradual father in his boxing attire on the wall in the background, is heart-breaking. Paret’s young wife, Lucy somehow carried on, never remarried, and is shown laying flowers on the grave of her slack husband forty-four years later. Finally, there is an emotional meeting of Griffith and Benny Jr., now in his forties, where Griffith, disquieted for years by that fateful night and his fears of meeting Benny Jr., embraces the fighter’s son. Lucy was never able to bring herself to meet with Emile. “I understand,” Griffith said to Benny Jr.
Ring of Fire is a profound commentary on fate, violence, primal pathos, cultural and class complexities, sexuality, wives and mothers, fathers, sons, tragedy, what it means to be a man, what it means to be human - a fiction writer couldn’t have invented this tale. Peep it for yourself. Unforgettable. Like that night in 1962.
Ring of Fire - The Emile Griffith Tale (2004) . Starring: Emile Griffith, Howie Albert Director: Ron Berger, Dan Klores. Running Time: 87 Min., Format: DVD MOVIE
Copyright © 2007 by Richard Arlin Stull.
