Death on a TV Set

Con Chapman

We had two TVs, one up and one downstairs.
Nothing unusual about that, but it allowed me
to see forbidden acts, with my parents unawares.

This luxury allowed me to sneak off to view
something that was barred — boxing.
My mother banned it, and never knew

that when I took my leave on Friday nights
from the family, no homework due the next day,
it was to watch, surreptitiously, the fights.

I knew the boxers in each weight division —
Carmen Basilio, Sugar Ray Robinson —
from watching them on that television.

Twice in less than a year Emile Griffith had fought
Benny “Kid” Paret; they were even at one apiece.
Paret held the welterweight crown, a prize bought

with beatings; twice he’d been knocked out
in the past year, once by Griffith, once by
Gene Fullmer, in a middleweight title bout.

On March 24, 1962, the title at stake,
the two met a third time. In the sixth round
Griffith was almost knocked out but escaped,

saved by the bell. In the twelfth, a tame
sleepwalk turned suddenly vicious;
backed into a corner, Paret became

nothing but a target. Dazed, unable to defend
himself, he slumped through the ropes, while
Griffith held him, punching until the end,

when finally the beating was stopped
by the referee after many screamed for
the fight to end. Benny dropped

into the corner, and was carried out
on a stretcher. His manager
said he’d tried to stop the bout,

to throw in the towel, but the ref
hadn’t heard. The noise of the crowd
drowned him out; he was deaf,

and Kid Paret—mute. Twenty-nine blows
to the head went unanswered;
twenty-nine times he was hit. I suppose

he didn’t feel many after the first,
but Griffith kept on slugging. Why
didn’t he stop? It was like a dam had burst.

The story wasn’t reported at the time; how
Benny had called Griffith maricón at the weigh-in,
to which the latter took exception. Now,

many years later, we know the word
was said; a slur, offensive, but true. Griffith
went to gay bars, but didn’t like what he heard.

Back then, that love dared not speak its name.
and for a fighter, it would have ended his career,
a most infamous way to achieve fame.

Benny hung on for ten days, April arrived.
I remember a grey spring, losing track of him
in a hospital bed, and whether he was still alive.

Paret was a come-back kid,
the referee said, that’s why he didn’t intervene
why he did what he did.

“He was the champ,” he said.
“You give the champ a chance to come back.”
He did, but now the champ was dead.

Benny is now fabled in story, poem and song,
even operas and plays, nearly half a century on.
In the ring there are rules, but no right or wrong.

Griffith died at the age of seventy-five.
He fought eighty-four more times, and
suffered from dementia pugilistica while alive.

He “didn’t like that word,” Paret used —
maricón—when he touched his butt.
For this, Griffith rained down his abuse

but, he said, he loved men and women the same;
when pressed, he said he liked women better,
still, there was no gain from clearing his name

so why the murderous rage?
Perhaps it was the narcissism of small differences
He was a story told on a different page.

A pitcher, not a catcher,
to use Truman Capote’s formula.
Not a catamite, of higher stature;

not a gunsel, not a boy —
a practitioner of the fistic arts,
not another man’s bedroom toy.

Thirty years later, Griffith nearly died
from a beating outside a gay bar
near a bus station, where men with hunger eyed

you in the men’s room. Griffith’s hands
were delicate enough to make women’s hats,
but they were hard, too — a boxing man’s.
—————————————–

I came downstairs, but didn’t reveal what I’d seen;
Benny “Kid” Paret, dead on a TV set,
lifeless on a black-and-white screen.

Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, and various literary magazines. Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges, his biography of Duke Ellington’s long-time alto sax, is published by Oxford University Press.