Vivid look back at a 1962 boxing death

The inciting incident of Dan Klores and Ron Berger’s gripping documentary, “Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story,” is an event that shook the boxing world more than 40 years ago. On March 24, 1962, at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Griffith fought Benny “Kid” Paret for the third time, the welterweight title having changed hands after both of the previous bouts. Less than two minutes into the 12th round of the nationally televised fight, Griffith unleashed a blistering series of left-right combinations, leaving Paret crumpled in the corner of the ring.

Griffith’s trainer, the renowned Gil Clancy, estimates that his fighter landed 17 punches in five seconds. Others present recall Griffith delivering 23 to 25 straight blows before Paret went down. In his famous essay, “The Death of Benny Paret” (excerpted as voice-over in the film), Norman Mailer compared the barrage to a “baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin.”

The 24-year-old Paret, a Cuban exile, lay in a coma for 10 days at New York’s Roosevelt Hospital before dying. Politicians called for an end to the sport or, at the very least, extreme reforms. TV advertisers pulled their commercials from programs such as “Friday Night Fights” and boxing disappeared from the networks for a time.

The death of an athlete at a major sporting event, witnessed in person by thousands and watched on television by millions more, alone would make for a compelling documentary. Klores and Berger, however, have woven a more complex and telling tale that explores themes beyond the world of sport.

New York in the early 1960s was still a Runyonesque milieu where gamblers and underworld figures mixed with celebrities and politicians ringside. The city was bereft over the loss of the Giants and Dodgers five years earlier (the Mets had not yet played their inaugural game) and boxing was a marquee sport alongside football and basketball.

The macho aesthetic was king and boxing was its brutal epitome. “It’s a Man’s, Man’s World” sings James Brown on “Ring of Fire’s” soundtrack, and that certainly sums up the New York sporting life of the period.

Entering that world was a sensitive young immigrant from the Virgin Islands named Emile Griffith. With his 44-inch shoulders and 26-inch waist, Griffith was quickly hustled into a boxing ring, leaving behind his previous jobs as a delivery boy and hat designer.

As he rose through the ranks of welterweight contenders, there had been whispers in boxing circles questioning Griffith’s sexuality, but it was an era in which the only publicly acknowledged homosexuals were writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Gore Vidal. “Even Liberace was considered straight,” notes historian Neal Gabler. The thought of a gay athlete was inconceivable.

At the afternoon weigh-in for the ill-fated fight, Paret taunted Griffith with a derogatory Spanish word for homosexual. The enraged Griffith had to be restrained by Clancy and was told to save it for the ring. For the early edition of the New York Times, in boxing writer Howard Tuckman’s description of the incident, the word homosexual had been changed to “unman.”

Amid this added subtext, some questioned whether Griffith’s anger fueled the tragedy. Others blamed Paret’s death on his manager, Manuel Alfaro, for allowing Paret to fight again so soon after a brutal beating at the hands of Gene Fullmer. Alfaro held referee Ruby Goldstein responsible, accusing him of letting the fight go on too long.

“Ring of Fire” doesn’t aim to resolve these impossibly complex issues, but the film does get a variety of opinions, and includes insightful interviews with journalists such as Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin and other witnesses who vividly set the scene for the fight and its aftermath.

Klores and Berger are also intrigued by the fates of those most affected by the event. Griffith, of course, is the film’s key figure and “Ring” traces his subsequent career in which he won and lost four more titles and several fortunes. Though he cut a flashy swath through the late ‘60s and ‘70s -- boxing until age 39, dressing nattily and driving pink Cadillacs -- he was forever haunted by the Paret fight.

Through interviews with Griffith, Luis Rodrigo (Griffith’s longtime roommate and adopted son), Sadie Griffith (a woman Griffith married for a short time after one date), as well as Paret’s widow and son Benny Jr., the filmmakers inject genuine emotion into an inherently tough-guy subject without resorting to sentimentality.

*

‘Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story’

Where: USA Network

When: 9 tonight

Ratings: TV-14-V (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for violence)

Executive producer Lewis Katz. Directed and produced by Dan Klores and Ron Berger.