He scored a number of quality wins, beating the likes of Nino Benvenuti, Dick Tiger, Bennie Briscoe, Ralph Dupas and Paret, among others.
But, as Dan Klores, who directed the brilliant documentary about Griffith, wrote in a 2012 piece in the New York Times, he hung around too long in an unforgiving sport and paid for it. And though the 1992 mugging altered his life forever, Griffith never really had peace after Paret’s death.
After Paret’s death, Griffith boxed for 15 more years, but he took excessive damage, Klores wrote.
Eventually, Emile got back in the ring. He won and lost the welterweight and middleweight titles four more times. He fought way too long, even married a woman, which lasted a few months. Joe Frazier was his best man at a lavish affair at the Concord Hotel in the Catskills.
How can you possibly be the same? How can a man endure the trauma of killing another while being told that nothing had changed?
In 1992, 15 years into retirement, he walked out of a gay bar near New York’s Port Authority. Five teenage thugs, one carrying a baseball bat, decided to mug him. They never figured the tipsy old man was a six-time world champion. He fought back and lost. The brain damage, compounded by more than 200 prizefights, was severe. Even then, at 54, Emile got off the pavement, took the subway to Queens, his head battered as if a piñata, bleeding; ribs, jaw and spleen broken. His cries and moans awakened Luis, his lover and “adopted son ,” asleep in their basement enclave. Startled, he yelled for Mommy to get up. They took him to Elmhurst General Hospital, where he spent the next four months.
Those who knew Griffith will never forget him.
Services are pending.
Article Appeared @http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/boxing/emile-griffith-noted-ex-welterweight-middleweight-champion-dies-160132443.html