Art Imitating Life | Dave's Place

Champion an opera by Terence Blanchard. Libretto by Michael Cristofer. With Eric Owens, Ryan Speedo Green, Ethan Joseph, Latonia Moore. *****

I have never reviewed an opera and certainly don’t have the qualifications. I’ve only been attending for a few years, and know little about the art form. I sometimes think television reviewers watch so much crap that, when they come across something halfway decent, they rave about it. On the other hand, if you’re reviewing operas at the Met, they’re all so good that you look for something to criticize, just to have credibility. The Times reviewer gave Champion a tepid review, and I have no doubt that, from his perspective, he’s correct. But I found it an emotionally overwhelming experience.

When I read the plot summary that accompanies the broadcast, I thought, how is Terence Blanchard going to pull this off, telling the story of an aging demented fighter who left a home in the Virgin Islands as a young man, encountered his mother on the streets of New York, became a fighter while working a day job as a milliner making women’s hats, eventually won three world championships, literally killed a man in the ring, eventually came out as gay, and late in life was beaten viciously as he came out of a gay bar? Also toward the end, he met the son of the man he had killed, Benny Paret Jr., and reconciled with him. I knew most of these facts of Griffith’s life before I went to the opera. I thought it was a mistake to try to pull them all together.

But I thought the opera did so brilliantly. Three different singers (Eric Owens, Ryan Speedo Green, and the eleven-year-old Ethan Joseph, who has a remarkable voice) played Griffith at various moments in his life, and all sang beautifully. The dance numbers were stunning to watch, bursting with energy. I thought Michael Cristofer’s libretto, and the way it worked together with the music, was marvelous (there was a prolonged rhyming sequence in the middle where you kept thinking, he can’t think of another rhyme. And then he did). I found the portrayal of Griffith’s dementia, and the final sequence, where his day comes to an end, especially moving. I don’t know how ranks in the canon of world opera, but as an emotionally moving work of art I would it high.[1]

I was also profoundly moved by this opera because it recalled moments in my life, things that happened sixty years ago.

In my house we had a television room upstairs where the family watched together, on what we then regarded as a large screen. Downstairs my father had a small den and a tiny portable TV. Both of those televisions were black and white; color was way in the future, at least for us. I liked watching upstairs with the family, on that larger TV, but especially loved sitting in the den and watching with my father. There was an intimacy about that, being alone with him, that I loved. He sat in a large red leather chair, and I sat on the stool that went along with it, leaned back against some bookshelves that supported my back. We were both within a few feet of the screen. We had to be, to see it at all.

On Friday nights we watched the Fight of the Week. If my father didn’t feel like it, he went out to the living room to read (he was a big reader, and those shelves that I leaned against were full of books). But often he did. He’d been a fight judge when he was in the army, and enjoyed a good fight, told me how a judge did his work, according to how many good blows landed, how a fighter might make the other guy miss, how often punches looked good but were glancing blows.

My memory is that the first fight we watched—I would have been about eleven—featured Benny “Kid” Paret. And the second, the next week, featured Emile Griffith.

Both of these men were welterweights, and both fought the same way. They waded in slugging, took a lot of punches in the hope of landing more. They were light athletic men, very quick. Their fights were extremely exciting. A fighter like Archie Moore (who was way past his prime at that point) was less exciting but much more skillful, because he knew how to defend himself and how to make the other guy miss. Paret and Griffith both slugged away. After that second week, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great to see these guys fight each other?

They eventually fought three times, all for the welterweight title. Griffith won the first, knocking Paret out in the 12^th round. Paret won the second, a controversial fifteen round split decision. In the third fight, Griffith knocked Paret out in the 12^th round. When Paret fell to the canvas, he was out cold. His handlers couldn’t revive him. He went into a coma, and died in the hospital ten days later.

One thing I didn’t remember, but which the opera mentioned prominently, was that after Paret won the second fight and became welterweight champ, he went up a class and fought Don Fullmer as a middleweight. I suppose he was hoping to hold both titles, which had been done; Fullmer was a major middleweight contender. But Fullmer knocked him out, flooring him three times in the tenth round, and Paret apparently told his manager he wasn’t ready for another fight when the Griffith bout was coming up. But the manager saw a chance for a big payday—Griffith was the former champ, and Paret owed him another fight—and signed the fight anyway, just three and a half months after the Fullmer fight, on March 24^th, 1962.

I was thirteen. My family was vacationing in Florida at the St. Petersburg beaches, staying at a goofy little motel called The Fargo. We rented two connecting rooms, and both had a TV. My memory is that on that night, my parents were watching something in their bedroom, and I watched the fight in the boys’ bedroom, where I slept with my two brothers. My memory is that I watched in the dark, with the sound way down. Maybe Rusty—six years old—had already gone to bed, or maybe all the others were watching the TV in the other room, and I was trying not to make noise. I was determined not to miss that fight.

A few things about it which the opera didn’t emphasize: both fighters took a lot of punches. The fact that they seemed to be in trouble didn’t mean much, because both had come back from dire situations to launch an offensive. Paret knocked Griffith down, and seemed to have him out on his feet, in the eighth round. The referee, Ruby Goldstein, was a great and famous referee, a former fighter; his name lives in infamy since that fight, but that’s unjust. He made a mistake, but anyone might have made it.

News accounts later, and the opera in particular, made a big deal of Paret using a slur against gay people—maricon—at the weigh-in. In the opera, in fact, he seemed really to be taunting him. But at the time (when the word gay hadn’t even been coined) people thought he was referring to the fact that Griffith made women’s hats for a living. No one said anything about Griffith’s sex life. Years later he said he was bisexual, and he was briefly married to a woman, but he seems mostly to have been interested in men.

I don’t remember the fight in detail. I do remember that all three fights were among the most exciting I had ever seen. At some point in the twelfth round, Paret was against the ropes, and Griffith delivered a flurry of punches. Later people would realize Paret was out on his feet, that Griffith was in essence pummeling an unconscious man, but at the time it looked like the same action that had characterized the whole fight. Goldstein did eventually see what was happening and stop the fight. Tragically, it was too late. I remember walking out to the other bedroom and telling my father that Paret was out cold, he wasn’t getting up. I was stunned. I’d never seen such a thing, in all the fights I’d watched.

Three years later, I would see Griffith in another famous fight, when he himself tried to go up and fight middleweight and fought the leading contender, Ruben Hurricane Carter. That fight was in Pittsburgh, and I attended it with my good friend Joe Cicchetti, whose father was sitting at ringside while we were up in the cheap seats (Joe’s father would have paid for him to sit ringside, but I had to pay for my own ticket and didn’t have that kind of money). Carter—one of the first fighters to shave his head—was one of the meanest looking guys I’d ever seen. Both fighters were great, and we figured it would be a war. We settled back in our seats for a long bout.

But Carter knocked Griffith down twice in the first round, and—perhaps because of Goldstein’s error a couple of years earlier—the referee, Buck McTiernan, stopped the fight. On our way home we gave a ride to one of the ring handlers, one of the guys who carried the buckets, in Mr. Cicchetti’s big black Cadillac. The guy’s name was Hooks, and he said, “It’s a good thing McTiernan stopped the fight when he did, because Griffith didn’t know where he was at.”

Hurricane Carter was later unjustly accused of murder, and became a cause celebre, the subject of a Bob Dylan song. At the time, that was a more famous fight than the bout with Paret. But with the passing of years, the Paret fight looms larger.

I couldn’t help thinking, as I watched the opera: did any of these aging opera fans actually see the fight? Was I the only one?

I’ve never forgotten it.

[1] The reviewer’s caveats mention two scenes in the second act, one where Griffith’s mother sings, one where his manager sings, each alone on stage. The reviewer says the scenes are unnecessary and detract from the dramatic tension of the work. I suppose that’s true, but I enjoyed both, especially the one with Griffith’s mother (Latonia Moore), one of the best singers in the production. I like my operas expansive and overdone. But what the hell do I know?