arly in "Ring of Fire," Pete Hamill says that boxing is a sport "of the poor, set up to entertain the middle class." But the documentary on USA tonight about Emile Griffith, the boxer who delivered a fatal beating to Benny (Kid) Paret in 1962, also suggests just how much boxing is a sport of the poor set up to entertain writers.
Mr. Hamill, Jack Newfield and Jimmy Breslin are among the writers who were invited to recall the mood and meaning of a fight that was shown live on television on March 24, 1962, a match that to some remains as memorable as Jack Ruby's shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 or the 1986 explosion of the Challenger space shuttle.
Yet the documentary, directed by Dan Klores and Ron Berger, shows several rounds of the fight and even rebroadcasts an amazing moment: as doctors were hustling the unconscious Paret onto a stretcher, the television announcer turned to Griffith, still panting and sweaty, and asked him to watch the knockout again in slow motion, the first time that technology was used during a live sports event, Mr. Klores said. As Griffith and boxing fans did 43 years ago, viewers see the rain of blows in agonizing detail, only this time they see it with the knowledge that Paret never woke up from his coma.
Even those riveting images are filtered through a writer's imagination: as the slow-motion action unfolds, Norman Mailer's voice describes Griffith's blows, "the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin," in an excerpt from his essay "The Death of Benny Paret."
Boxing is not a metaphor for combat, it is combat, a sport so elemental that it turns writers into piston rods at the typewriter. Joyce Carol Oates tried to explain her own fascination. "The writer contemplates his opposite in the boxer, who is all public display, all risk, and ideally, all improvisation," she wrote in "On Boxing" (Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987). "He will know his limit in a way the writer, like all artists, never quite knows his limit."
Boxing has lost some of the luster it had in the 50's and 60's, and so too have its troubadours. "Ring of Fire" tells an amazing story, but it is cottoned in deep nostalgia for a lost world where television was in black and white, and boxing was big and made even bigger by the likes of A. J. Liebling and Red Smith.
Paret's son and widow are alive and talking, and so are his managers and trainers. And so is Griffith. In the documentary, he proves himself to be a compelling and poignant witness to his own life. His story was much more baroque than the average boxer's tale. An immigrant from St. Thomas, V.I., who was hired as a delivery boy and briefly designed ladies' hats in New York's Garment District, he was gay at a time when homosexuality in sports seemed unthinkable and was certainly unmentionable. One of the theories raised in the film is that Griffith fought with such rage because Paret goaded him during the weigh-in, whispering "maricón," a Spanish slur for homosexual.
Griffith, who never quite acknowledges his sexual orientation though he was almost beaten to death by thugs after leaving a gay bar in 1992, gives his own, far more eloquent explanation in a climactic scene in the cemetery where Paret was buried. The filmmakers arranged for Paret's son to be there and meet his father's last opponent. The setting was staged, but the two men's tears are moving nevertheless.
"I didn't want to kill no one," Griffith says as the two men embrace. "But things happen."
'Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story'
USA Network, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Directed by Dan Klores and Ron Berger.
