Word: paretics
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...like a child's when he puts on his old boxing robe. He does not look like someone who would kill a man with his hands. But that's exactly what he did the night of March 24, 1962, during a televised boxing match against welterweight champion Benny Paret. Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, a documentary from Dan Klores and Ron Berger (USA, April 20, 9 p.m. E.T.), searingly remembers a contest that crossed the invisible line into a killing...
...weigh-in, Paret, a Cuban immigrant, called Griffith "maricón"--a Spanish slur for homosexual and an allusion to rumors that Griffith was gay. Griffith does not reveal his sexual orientation, but, he says calmly, "I wasn't nobody's faggot." In the 12th round, he trapped Paret in the corner and unleashed a brutal flurry of uppercuts to his head. Norman Mailer likened the barrage to "a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin." Paret died 10 days later...
...death led to the end of televised fights for years. (It's a history lesson for anyone decrying the chaperoned stunts on Fear Factor as a dangerous new low.) And Griffith could never shake the ghastly image of Paret slumped in his corner. Ring of Fire never really reveals what he was thinking as he flailed away on Paret, but it ends in tearful closure as he meets Paret's son for the first time. A gracefully told story of sport, sexuality and contrition, Ring of Fire is an emotional knockout. --By James Poniewozik
When Kim or Benny ("Kid") Paret or somebody else noticeable dies, there is always a momentary call for stricter regulations, fewer rounds, lighter gloves. And headgear, though one of the six boxers killed this year was wearing one. Naturally, some people also talk of abolishing boxing. But when boxing was illegal, men fought in back rooms and on barges. Men fight. Some put courage with skill and make art, not that boxing is justified even as art (though Muhammad Ali in his prime surely made it seem so). Boxing will exist as long as what it reflects in men exists...
...pieces of them. His courage is not in question; the Company remembers how Cacciato got the Silver Star for shooting a Viet Cong in the teeth. But one day the goofy kid checks out, marching to Paris, and the squad is sent to bring him back--Paul Berlin, Doc Paret, Oscar Johnson, the Lieutenant, and the rest--but in Paris they lose him, just as they lost him all along the way. This is a wonderful idea for a novel, but even in this novel it doesn't quite happen--at the Laotian border the squad turns back...