A Man's World: the Double Life of Emile Griffith by Donald McRae

Simon and Schuster 2015

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Boxing is probably the sport that is most dominated by a macho culture; a set of values that drives men to exaggerate their own strength and invulnerability and to underestimate the dangers posed to themselves by the sport.  The training is hard and unremitting; the fighting is harder.  A boxer never seems to know when he is beaten and never seems to know when the end has come.

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Donald McCrae has written a book about a man for whom the boxing profession was both a paradise and a prison.  It gave him access to wealth and a lifestyle that would have been unthinkable in his early years.  It allowed him to take care of his family and those he loved.  However, it also shackled him to a set of ideas about what being a man is that forced him to deny an important part of his own identity.

That man was called Emile Griffith.  He was a professional boxer from the U.S. Virgin Islands who became a World champion in the welterweight, junior middleweight and middleweight classes in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  After 18 years as a professional boxer, Griffith retired with a record of 85 wins (25 by knockout, 24 losses and 2 draws. 

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Griffith’s sexuality was fluid in a time and place that required an acquired solidity in these things.  A lifestyle like Emile’s that involved going to gay club’s and enjoying the company of men made getting into the boxing ring, by comparison, a low risk activity.  As McRae outlines:

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'Sexual relations between people of the same gender (in the early 1960’s) were still a criminal act in every state in America.  Even consensual sex between two adult men in the privacy of their home could result in imprisonment.' (p.39)

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Griffith’s sexuality and his chosen profession of boxing collided when one of his opponents, Benny ‘the kid’ Paret, a Cuban boxer, taunted him before the second of their three fights.  By calling him Maricon (a Spanish word that equates with ‘faggot’ but carries an impact that goes way beyond the ignorance and ignominy of that word) Paret raised the emotional temperature of their bouts tenfold.  In the third, on 24th March 1962, Griffith knocked out Paret in a brutal end to the fight.  He never recovered and died ten days later.

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This event forms the emotional centre of the book.  Indeed, the book draws out how it became the emotional black hole of the boxer’s life, the event from which there seemed to be no salvation.  Griffith’s words spoken to his first biographer Ron Ross some forty years after the fight are used by McRae as a melancholic leitmotif of Griffiths life, a parable that repeatedly suggested the values of the society in which he lived were not written with him in mind.  He felt like an outsider and he never quite knew how to get back in:

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'I keep thinking how strange it is.  I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me.  However, I love a man and many say this makes me an evil person.  To so many people this is an unforgiveable sin.'

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This ground has been covered before by Ron Ross (‘Nine, ten . . . and out.  The two Worlds of Emile Griffith. DiBella Entertainment 2008 and in the excellent documentary Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story 2005).  What McRae appears to have added here is a greater sense of the period through which Griffith lived and the way in which the events of his life intertwined with both those of the boxing world and America.  In particular, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Bobby as well as Martin Luther King appear in the book like the altered images of a society that had somehow lost its way.  A country that had its President assassinated was somehow connected with a country that allowed its men (usually working-class impoverished men) to place their own lives at risk by getting into a boxing ring.  The Stonewall riots of 1969 were more directly linked to Griffith as a close friend was directly involved but discussion of this, too, is used to signpost for the reader the huge changes that were taking place around one man and his struggle to come to terms with the events of his own life. 

That this is done with such forensic detail, nuanced corollary and no amount of love for his subject will perhaps be no surprise to those that have read McRae’s previous books.  For me it felt like that warm experience of having a conversation with someone who is both engaging in content and generous in delivery.  McRae allows you to discover the story without hurrying you and without preaching which makes the reading all the more enjoyable.

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The culmination of ‘Ring of Fire’ is a meeting between Benny Paret’s son and Griffith in Central Park.  It was a small opportunity for the fighter to seek some redemption by explaining to the son his feelings about the death of the father.  McRae’s description of the meeting is deeply moving and speaks to the experience that, deep down, we all require:

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'Emile reached out to bring Benny Jr. close to him.  He was still crying, but with tangled happiness.  The two men, aged sixty-four and forty-two, held their embrace for a long time.  They were bound tightly together by boxing, by life and death, and in the end, by forgiveness and love.' (p.372)

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A Man’s World is a fabulous sporting chronicle of a young man who discovered his talent almost by accident but pursued the execution of it with phenomenal dedication.  It is also about the way in which society is a conduit for its sport; channelling it, setting its values and declaring what is right and what is wrong so that sportsmen and women have to align themselves to those values or risk ostracism and rejection if they do not.  It is the enthralling account of a period of great change in American society, without losing sight that this was one man’s story and perhaps a man for whom the labels that went along with change were unwelcome.  In the words of Emile’s one-time girlfriend Esther Taylor, it is perhaps one of the best reasons to write a story:

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'Emile was a good person.  That’s all that matters in the end.' (p.405)

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