Was benny paret gay
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The rule allowing them to stand back up after a knockdown and continue fighting has put many boxers at risk.
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Join our newsletter to receive exclusive updates and curated insights directly to your inbox. It was those around him, namely con artists like Mailer, and the gangsters and politicians in the front row, who went “off on an orgy” of bloodlust for the violence of boxing, violence that rarely rivals the kind we exaggerate, distort and fetishize on television and in other forms of mass entertainment.
The live footage of the events that took place after Paret’s collapse provides far more damning evidence of human cruelty and callousness.
With painstaking detail, the film reveals that for the purpose of mass entertainment, there are people who suffer more than we can imagine. Still, he achieved professional success because early in his career he’d resolved, “I wasn’t nobody’s faggot.”
When Griffith began to dominate the welterweight division in the early 1960s, homosexuality was deemed a disease, a crime against nature, as it still is today, though to a marginally lesser extent, human progress being a game of inches.
In a recent episode of the ‘Joe Rogan Experience,’ the UFC color commentator spoke about some extreme fights that led to severe consequences.
Joementioned the infamous death of Benny Paret during his fight withEmile Griffith. The infamous fight saw some of the biggest controversies in boxing history.
Sometime I still have nightmares … I wake up sometime, I feel my sweat all over my face, I don’t know … Memories come back, there’s nothing you can do about it. When he finally came out, Emile claimed he was bisexual and that his attachments with men were more social and emotional than sexual.
However, he finally came out as gay in a 2008 book about his life.
An unforgivable sin
After decades of pondering on the subject, Emile remained bewildered by society’s hypocrisy.
“I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me.
As Paret lay dying on the mat, Alfaro is alleged to have said, “Now I have to go find a new boy.”
Paret, however, did taunt Griffith before their second and third fights, calling him a maricon, Spanish for ‘faggot.’ Prior to the third match, an article in The New York Times, entitled “Paret and Hat Designer Griffith Gird for Welter Title Fight,” referred to Emile as an “unman.” In the film Griffith relates the impact of Paret’s slurs and the media fixation on his then-alleged homosexuality (he came out in 2008): “When I had [Paret] in the corner in the twelfth round, I was very angry.
The film puts most of the blame for Paret’s death on Alfaro. Come on, get going!” As much as such sentiments offer wisdom and practical advice for one who struggles, albeit briefly, with his conscience as he considers crushing another to climb the ladder of success, in fact reporter Jimmy Breslin used these words to admonish Griffith to get over the fact he’d killed a man.
But the closeted gay boxer suffered nightmares for decades after he knocked out an opponent who’d called him by a gay slur, and the man subsequently died.
Although he happily hung out at gay bars, Emile Griffith remained closeted in his professional life.
Well… sort of…
Rumours abounded about the boxer from the Virgin Islands who lisped, dressed immaculately, and worked as a lady’s hat designer.
The Miami News described him as an over-sensitive, highly emotional young man among a list of other traits broadly hinting at Emile’s sexuality.
“When he won, [he] went around and kissed everyone that didn’t duck first.”
Emile Griffith remained closeted for fear of the reaction of the general public and the boxing industry.
Despite constant gossip and speculation, no one ever said anything to the closeted gay boxer’s face.
…until March 24, 1962.
Emile Griffith vs Banny Paret
At the weigh-in for the 1962 title fight, Emile heard his manager say “Hey, watch it!”
Turning around, he caught his Cuban opponent pretending to fck him.
The interviewer asks “to replay the knockout in slow-motion videotape,” and as we watch Griffith pounding Paret’s head with inside uppercuts of pin-point accuracy, the interviewer quips, “That’s beautiful camera work, isn’t it?” Someone off-camera shouts, “Terrific!” I imagine it would have been even more “terrific” if chunks of Paret’s “pumpkin” had pelted the audience, spraying from his temples in flakes and strings.
The fallout from Paret’s televised death, after being replayed day and night for weeks, included sponsors pulling ads from Friday Night Fights.
Emile Griffith won world titles in three weight divisions. Even in old age, his memories blotted by boxer’s dementia, unable to remember how his beloved mother died seven years earlier, he’s still a tortured man. In that fight, Benn punished McClellan so badly that the fighter went into a coma for 2 weeks. In that fight, the referee allowed Griffith to beat up a defenseless Paret.
Portrayed as a man of depth and sensitivity, obedient to his trainers, yearning both for a father figure and to be a father himself, Griffith later adopted a juvenile delinquent when, after his retirement from boxing, he became a youth house corrections officer.
The film’s sympathetic portrait of Griffith contradicts the picture author Norman Mailer painted of him in strokes of gross hyperbole.
Benny Paret then directed a homophobic slur at Emile, in Spanish.
“Hey Maricón, I’m gonna get you and your husband.”
Emile Griffith lost his temper but his manager separated the boxers.
“Save it for tonight, Emile.”
That night, the referee stopped the match in the 12th round after Paret experienced numerous blows to the head.
He died 10 days later.
Emile Griffin suffered depression and nightmares for the rest of his life over the death of the poor young Cuban boxer with a widow and baby son.
Despite numerous newspaper articles making it clear what Paret said to him, he also remained in the closet for many years.
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Joe Rogan on the importance of competent referees in fights
Joe Rogan has been commentating in the UFC for over 20 years and has always been passionate about fighter safety.
Nobody never called me no faggot before.” And yet Griffith doesn’t strike one as a brutal killer.
According to his biographer Ron Ross, at the start of his career Griffith was “reluctant to become a fighter.” When ahead on points his aggressiveness would wane; his trainer Gil Clancy “really had to instil the killer instinct in him.” Griffith was devoted to his family and used the money he earned from his first eight fights to bring his mother and seven brothers and sisters, one by one, from the Virgin Islands to New York.
Griffith’s avenging rage would lead him down a long, tortuous path toward wisdom and forgiveness, neither offering consolation nor lessening the anguish borne of his tragic victory.
The documentary does excellent work of fleshing out both Griffith and Paret as complex human beings, shattering the stereotype of the boxer as heartless brute.
The tragic spectacle and its aftermath aroused an orgy of hypocrisy and, in Clancy’s cutting phrase, “an occasion for one of these epidemics of piety.” Besides, the heyday of boxing is long gone, the sport enduring a slow decline, surmounted by even more violent sports, like mixed martial arts, where watchers can fantasize about a heel-kick shattering an orbital bone, the eyeball swinging from its socket like a clapper.
“This is a cold, cruel world!