A BAD GOOD FIGHT
When asked about the soft punch that had dropped Tiger in the ninth round, Griffith exploded again. He offered his fist up to the writers who’d dared question his power. “Would you like to feel it?” he snarled. Griffith went on, explaining that he’d sprained his ankle on the last day of training, showing his leg to reporters so they could examine the swelling, though he’d been quite nimble during the bout and showed no signs of impaired mobility. When asked about the customers booing throughout the fight, Griffith insisted they were booing Tiger, not him. “I was the one throwing punches,” he said. He credited his trainer, Gil Clancy, who had instructed him to stay on the move and not allow the hard-punching Tiger to get set. Then, when told that 18 of 24 ringside reporters thought Tiger had deserved the verdict, Griffith hissed, “They’re crazy.” Granted, the fight a man experiences in the ring can be vastly different than the one we see from the cheap seats. We see a man running for cover. He sees it as smart boxing. But the Tiger-Griffith bout of April 25, 1966, gave people little to agree on. They couldn’t agree on whether it had been a quality fight, or on whether the right man had won. Griffith even argued with reporters on the number of knockdowns in the fight, claiming he’d decked Tiger twice when it had only been once. The judges, too, were only in vague agreement over what had happened. One had it 8-7 for Griffith, while a second had it for Griffith, 7-6-2. Using the system favored in New York at the time, the third card was supplied by in- ring referee Arthur Mercante, who had it wider for Griffith at 9-5-1. To illustrate the stinking closeness of the fight, only three of the 15 rounds were unanimous for Griffith, and only two for Tiger. The remaining 10 rounds were split up across the cards, though an aggregate of the scorecards favored Griffith, 7-5-3. If Griffith seemed churlish after the
bout, it may have been because reporters were downplaying his achievement. He was, after all, one of the rare welterweight champions to challenge for the middleweight title and win. Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio had done it, but many others had tried and failed. Beating Tiger, a formidable middleweight in his own right, should’ve been a big story and put Griffith in some elite company. Instead, there was grousing about the scoring and audible disappointment from the crowd. “In Nigeria, where I come from, it takes two to make a fight. But tonight, the person who ran away won the decision and I don’t understand it.” Griffith’s mood may have been hampered for other reasons. Despite 50 professional wins and three turns as welterweight champion, Griffith’s extravagant lifestyle saw him spend his money faster than he could make it. His mother and other relatives also drained his earnings. Griffith, though he was only 28 and should’ve been on top of the world, was broke. Additionally, Griffith’s guarded lifestyle was becoming harder to keep private. At a time when one couldn’t use the word “gay” on television, sportswriters had begun describing Griffith as “foppish” and “childlike,” with constant references to his “hip- hugging” tight pants, and his excess of diamond bracelets. Milton Gross, one of the most widely read syndicated columnists of the day, published a story that year titled, “Emile Griffith, A Strange Man,” while a feature in Sports Illustrated made special note of Griffith’s lavishly decorated Weehawken apartment, his leopard-skin bedspreads,
pink phone and carefully groomed white poodle. Without blatantly calling Griffith out as a homosexual, the inferences in these articles would be clear to even the dimmest readers. The fight’s aftermath, however, had less to do with Griffith’s personal secrets and more to do with the way he’d taken the title. He’d committed the unforgivable sin of winning the championship with a safety-first approach. Tiger, who had been a 2-to-1 favorite and came into the ring with a 9½-pound weight advantage, let the press know how he felt. “In Nigeria, where I come from,” Tiger said, “it takes two to make a fight. But tonight, the person who ran away won the decision and I don’t understand it.” Few fights have ever inspired such lengthy discussions on how judges did their job. Veteran boxing writer Gene Ward of the Daily News figured Tiger had won at least nine rounds, but described scoring as an “inexact science,” with judges subject to any number of prejudices, “many of them subconscious.” After joking that the scorers didn’t like the hue of Tiger’s trunks, “a delicate blue for the benefit of color television,” Ward offered a treatise on how a judge thinks. He believed many simply vote for the underdog, which Griffith was, especially if the other fighter is perceived as a bully or uses bully tactics. “He may be prejudiced against the favorite,” Ward wrote, “or against the heavier man. Maybe he just doesn’t like Tiger’s plodding, shuffling style, preferring, instead, Griffith’s quicker and flashier fisticuffing. “There are officials who invariably vote in favor of the boxer who presses the fight. And there are others who will go for the counter-punching type. “When it comes to the hunter and the hunted, the scorer lets his subconscious emotions take charge, with the result that the hunted man gets the benefit of his scoring doubts.”
Ward ended his screed with a prevailing sentiment of the day: the hope that referees would someday be relieved of scoring duties, which eventually happened in the 1970s in favor of three ringside judges. Ward even suggested judges swap seats every few rounds so they’d see the action from different angles. Yet he was doubtful that anything could improve the vagaries of scoring. “These innovations might help,” he wrote, “but, in the end, you still are left with foibles that produce the inequities of the inexact science of scoring.” Ward may have disliked the verdict, but he ranked Tiger-
Griffith “a good fight” and felt the turnout proved “the lacerated carcass of boxing wasn’t dead after all.” But his was a minority opinion. Even one of his colleagues at the Daily News reported that “the battle between the two world champs was not exactly big news.” Syndicated columnist Red Smith, one of America’s beloved sportswriters, noted the “boos and shrill, derisive whistling” from the 14,934 in attendance and declared, “It was by no means a great fight.” Yet Smith believed Griffith had deserved the win, as did another veteran columnist, Dick Young, who mocked the
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