Terence Blanchard Performs at the Centene Center. Photograph by Patti Gabriel
On March 24, 1962, America watched a man get beaten to death on live television.
It was during ABC’s broadcast of Friday Night Fights from Madison Square Garden—a third, deciding bout between Benny “The Kid” Paret and Emile Griffith. At the weigh-in before the second match, Paret—who was Cuban—called Griffith a name: maricón, an anti-gay slur in Spanish. “If you don’t stop that,” Griffith warned him, “we’re going to have it out right here.” At the next weigh-in, Paret whispered the same word in Griffith’s ear and pinched his ass. Knowing no one would allow Griffith to punch him in the locker room—there was too much money riding on the fight—Paret grinned at him, infuriating him further.
Griffith’s trainer took the fighter for a walk around the block to cool him down. But by the 12th round, Paret lay slumped against the ropes, unconscious. And Griffith continued to punch and punch and punch. He struck Paret in the head more than 20 times before the referee intervened. Paret’s brain was bleeding. The fighter was removed from the ring on a stretcher and rushed to the hospital.
Griffith was crowned world welterweight boxing champion. After lingering in a coma for 10 days, Paret died at the age of 25, leaving behind a pregnant widow and a 2-year-old son.
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Gene Dobbs Bradford, executive director of Jazz St. Louis, still has notes from a meeting in December 2006 with Charles MacKay, then director of Opera Theatre of St. Louis. They talked about co-commissioning a traveling jazz opera for young people based on the life of Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champ.
By 2008, though, MacKay was in Santa Fe, N.M. His replacement, Timothy O’Leary, and artistic director James Robinson had shifted the conversation: Opera Theatre would host a jazz opera, but it would be on the main stage.
They asked Bradford: Who is the finest living jazz composer you know? Without hesitation, Bradford replied, “Terence Blanchard.”
“The good news is, I know him,” he added, “and his father was an operatic baritone, so he might be interested.”
Blanchard—a jazz trumpet player, bandleader, and four-time Grammy Award winner—had already contemplated writing an opera and had composed movie scores for years, including the affecting soundtrack for Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. As Bradford and Blanchard discussed possible subjects for the libretto, Bradford mentioned Johnson.
“Well, you know, I box…” Blanchard said.
Rather than focus the production on Johnson, though, Blanchard suggested Griffith. “To go through what he went through—to take another person’s life unintentionally, doing something that you were trained to do…” Blanchard trails off. “He even tried to get out of that fight—he had a premonition that something wrong was going to go down.”
Blanchard asked Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and director Michael Cristofer to write the libretto; the two had worked together on the films Gia and Original Sin. “We were newbies at [opera],” Blanchard says, “so we were going through the fire together.”
“We’re both virgins, yes, in this world of opera,” Cristofer says, laughing. Though Cristofer’s early career was spent in musical comedies and he’d collaborated with a composer once before, the prospect of writing an opera—about a living person, no less—was “terrifying.” But it was hard for him to resist Griffith’s story.
“It’s bigger than anything Verdi ever wrote,” he says.
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Champion opens with Griffith in his late sixties, in the first stages of dementia, struggling to put on his shoes, with assistance from his adopted son, Luis. He is getting ready to go to the park to meet Paret Jr. to ask his forgiveness. He wonders aloud whether one of his shoes has walked off by itself.
“Then a bell rings, and we flash back to another moment of Emile’s life,” says O’Leary, describing the opening moments of the production. “The opera keeps moving through time that way. It’s called ‘An Opera in 10 Rounds.’ So you’ve got older Emile and young Emile… There’s even a boy soprano who plays the role of Emile as child.”
Griffith was born on the island of St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, where he spent part of his adolescence in a boys’ home. There, as punishment, he was forced to spend hours in the heat, standing on jagged rocks or holding buckets of water. After following his mother to New York at age 19, he worked as a stock boy for a milliner. One hot day, as Griffith was working with his shirt off, his boss noticed that his physique was perfect for boxing. He sent Griffith to the 28th Street Parks Department Gym to train with Gil Clancy, Muhammad Ali’s trainer.
“He fell into boxing accidentally,” Cristofer explains. “He was more interested in being a baseball player and a singer. Apparently, he had quite a beautiful voice, and some of his happier moments were spent with music.” He also designed ladies’ hats for the millinery.
Unbeknownst to the people around him, including his mother, he was slipping off to gay bars in Times Square in his spare time. Paret’s insult and newspaper headlines at the time—one shouted “PARET AND HAT DESIGNER GRIFFITH GIRD FOR 3RD WELTERWEIGHT FIGHT”—suggest there were suspicions about Griffith’s sexuality. But coming out would have almost definitely ended Griffith’s career.
He wanted to quit, especially after the fight that killed Paret. People spat on him in the street; he moved into a hotel, fearing for his life. (Later, in 1992, Griffith was assaulted while leaving a gay bar in New York City; the head injuries he sustained would contribute to his dementia.) But as Griffith once explained, “I didn’t know how to do anything but fight.” Boxing supported the family; it bought his mother a house in Queens. Griffith wouldn’t retire from boxing until 1977, more than 15 years after his terminal fight with Paret.
“I didn’t use it in the opera, but when Emile’s mother died, the family sort of turned against him, even after he brought seven of them out of the Caribbean to the U.S. and basically supported them forever,” Cristofer says. “They were all living in the house and managed to get that away from him. He moved into this small apartment in Hempstead, Long Island, where he and Luis have been living.”
Luis is the one constant in Griffith’s life, as dementia continues to hollow out the former boxer, day by day. (In the ’50s and ’60s, Cristofer explains, it was common for gay men to tie themselves together legally through adoption—Luis is Emile’s partner.) When O’Leary visited Griffith last March to tell him about Champion, though, something flickered.
Griffith smiled.
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Champion is not a “jazz opera,” Blanchard explains, but an “opera in jazz.”
“My whole concept has been to take the language of jazz and to use that as a springboard for how we’re going to tell this story with an orchestra and with operatic singers,” Blanchard explains. “The rhythms of the music, the harmonic progressions, the melodic development I grew up playing, that’s the grammar that I use musically to tell the story.”
Blanchard worked from Cristofer’s libretto, which started with intense research, including the 2005 film Ring of Fire, which documents the meeting in Central Park between Griffith and Paret Jr. “I was writing with the idea clearly in my head that these words were going to be sung,” Cristofer says. “It pushed me toward writing as if I were writing a sort of epic poem.”
The defining moment of the opera is the aria “What Makes a Man a Man?” Griffith is about to step into the ring with Paret and asks himself whether love has made him strong or weak. He wonders, at his core, who he is.
“There is a soul, I know, somewhere inside,” he sings. “You feel it pull, you feel it lift. It carries you and takes you where you know you have to go.”
In 2012—50 years after that night in the ring—Opera Theatre of St. Louis held three workshops for the opera, two here and one in Cincinnati. At the final workshop, last October, the work was partially staged in front of an audience.
“I was a nervous wreck—usually I’m onstage!” Blanchard says. “I’ve never really heard my music played back to me.”
But the reception was powerful and positive. In fact, The New York Times’ ArtsBeat blog and Down Beat have already written about Champion. “And how often do you see opera written up in Down Beat?” Bradford says. “The music that he’s writing for this is so fresh. I’ve never heard anything like it.” And it is music that can be performed as jazz, he adds, by Blanchard’s quintet, or as vocal repertoire, for cabaret. Bradford also thinks it has broad appeal: Though it’s topically about boxing, “in other ways, it’s not about boxing at all.” Cristofer could easily see it playing Broadway.
In April, though, O’Leary was focused on the world premiere in St. Louis. The musicians were working on orchestration, and the cast—including Denyce Graves, Aubrey Allicock, Robert Orth, and Arthur Woodley—was about to start rehearsals. “Things change during that process,” O’Leary says. “It’s a lot like childbirth: There are labor pains, and until opening night, it’s not really born.”
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In 2004, at age 66, still trim and upright, wearing sweats and a leather jacket, Griffith walked into Central Park to meet Paret Jr. The two men saw each other at once.
“Mr. Griffith?” Paret Jr. asked.
“Are you…The Kid’s…son?” he replied.
Paret Jr. walked forward, with sad eyes.
“I didn’t go in there to hurt no one,” Griffith said, with tears in his eyes. “But things happen.”
“I know,” Paret Jr. assured him. “It’s OK.”
Griffith embraced Paret Jr. “Thank you,” Griffith wept. “Thank you, sir.”
Boxing, Blanchard says, is not just two guys hitting each other. “It is a serious chess match,” he says. “It’s a whole mind thing, what occurs between two fighters.”
Paret was trying to get a mental edge over Griffith, Ring of Fire co-director Dan Klores wrote in The New York Times. Paret was badly injured from a fight four months prior and wasn’t even supposed to be in the ring. But he needed the money: This purse would help him buy a butcher shop on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, so he could get out of fighting forever.
Griffith told the makers of Ring of Fire that he didn’t know Spanish, but he knew what maricón meant. “And I wasn’t nobody’s faggot,” he said. But the rage he felt was also directed at himself—after a losing match, he would hide for days, not even going to the gym, stewing in self-hatred. “I couldn’t get along with myself,” he said.
“In the scene with Benny Paret Jr., when he asks for forgiveness, Paret says to him, ‘It’s not for me to give forgiveness,’” Cristofer says. “It’s really about Emile forgiving himself for everything…and everything that he is.”
Champion runs June 15 through 30. For more information, call Opera Theatre of St. Louis at 314-961-0644 or go to opera-stl.org.
