Lover and fighter

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed.

But another dead man is the focus of this book: our hero is the captivating, frustrating, brutal Emile Griffith, who we meet at the age of 22, ‘happy and beautiful’, and who one year later battered to death the Cuban fighter Benny Paret, the first man whose death was shown live on television (the second was Lee Harvey Oswald). Griffith was not the only boxer to have killed another, but in most other ways he was unique: a man with the rippling muscles of an Adonis and a prodigious talent for punching, he was a closet homosexual all his life.