World champion boxer who inflicted fatal injuries on an opponent in the ring
Although Emile Griffith, who has died aged 75, was a world champion at both welterweight and middleweight at a time when those divisions were loaded with talent, his enduring reputation today hinges on the night of 24 March 1962, when he regained his world welterweight championship from the Cuban fighter Benny "Kid" Paret, killing him in the process. The fight took on greater impact because it was televised live from New York's Madison Square Garden on a Saturday night, so that even a boy of 11 like me might watch as Griffith pummelled Paret, hanging helpless on the corner ropes.
The unconscious Paret was rushed to Roosevelt hospital. Ten days later, never having regained consciousness, he died.
Another story lurked in the shadows. At the weigh-in, Paret taunted Griffith, calling him maricón, Spanish slang for sissy or queer.
Paret floored Griffith for an eight-count in round six before Griffith took control. In the 12th, he landed a number of telling punches before a right staggered the Cuban, who retreated into the corner. Referee Ruby Goldstein stood directly behind Griffith, inexplicably slow to stop the beating. Paret was known for his ability to take a punch and Griffith was not a big puncher, but Paret was clearly out long before Goldstein stepped in.
Griffith always denied he intended deliberate punishment, and watching his concern as he moved to Paret immediately after his hand was raised in victory, it is easy to believe he was telling the truth. But the fight haunted him – and the whispers about his sexuality trailed him – for the rest of his life.
Griffith was born in St Thomas, in the US Virgin Islands. One of eight children abandoned by their father, he was raised by relatives while his mother found work in New York, sending for him when he was 12. He was employed in a garment factory whose owner, a former boxer, gave him permission to work shirtless in the heat. Taking one look at Griffith's narrow waist and broad shoulders, he sent the boy to trainer Gil Clancy.
By 1958, Griffith was the Golden Gloves champion at welterweight, and he turned professional. In 1961, he beat Paret on a 13th-round knockout to win the welterweight crown. Six months later he lost the rematch by a disputed split decision, setting up the fatal decider.
The governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, ordered an investigation, which cleared both Griffith and Goldstein of blame. Goldstein never refereed another fight, and the ABC network dropped primetime boxing for the next 20 years. Griffith, haunted by nightmares, claimed he was never again as aggressive a fighter. He lost the title to another Cuban, Luis Manuel Rodríguez, but regained it in June 1963 and held it until 1966, when he vacated it after beating Dick Tiger for the middleweight crown. He had lost three fights to middleweights, including Hurricane Carter, along the way, preparing to move up.
He lost, regained and lost the middleweight crown again in a memorable series of fights with the Italian Nino Benvenuti in 1967-68. Benvenuti thought so much of Griffith that he later flew him to Italy to be godfather to his son. After losing title fights at welter to José Nápoles and twice at middleweight to Carlos Monzón, he slid into a long string of meaningless paydays. His final bout was a loss in Monaco to Britain's Alan Minter in July 1977.
In 1971, Griffith married Mercedes Donastorg, a dancer he had met in St Thomas. The lavish ceremony was held at the Concord hotel in the Catskills, where he trained, with Joe Frazier as best man. The marriage lasted less than two years, though he adopted Donastorg's daughter, Christine. After retiring, Griffith briefly coached the Danish Olympic team, then worked as a corrections officer at a juvenile facility in New Jersey, where he met Luis Rodrigo, who became his companion, publicly called an adopted son. The relationship cost him his job, so Griffith began bartending in Jersey City while training fighters, most notably Wilfred Benítez.
His sexuality remained an open question until a night in 1992, when he fought back after being attacked by a gang as he left Hombre, a gay bar near New York's port authority terminal. The savage beating he received left him close to death from kidney failure, and the trauma to his head would exacerbate the damage he had received while boxing. Yet even as gay sportsmen began to come out, Griffith seemed trapped in boxing's macho world.
In a moving 2005 documentary, Ring of Fire, Griffith met Paret's son, two years old when his father died, and told him: "I didn't want to kill no one, but things happen."
It is evident from the film and from a biography, Nine Ten and Out: The Two Worlds of Emile Griffith (2008), that Griffith struggled to define himself as others would see him. In 2005 he said: "I've chased men and women. I like men and women both. But I don't like that word: homosexual, gay or faggot. I don't know what I am."
Griffith died from kidney failure after suffering from dementia. He is survived by his seven siblings, and by Luis.
• Emile Alphonse Griffith, boxer, born 3 February 1938; died 23 July 2013