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Epilogue Nightmares The nightmares began soon after he retired. They were always the same. A voice would whisper, “Kill him.” He knew the voice. It belonged to Benny Paret. “Kill him,” Benny would say. “Don’t worry. I will be in your corner.” Kid Paret wanted Gaspar to exact his revenge against Emile Griffith. “No, I can’t,” Gaspar would tell the specter. “I’m retired now.” Then he would jolt awake, slicked in sweat. Night after night, Benny’s disembodied voice would come and offer its grave request. After a week it got so bad that Gaspar didn’t want to go to sleep. He went to a doctor in New York who gave a thin plastic envelope containing three tiny pills. “Take one of these before you go to bed,” said the doc. That night, Gaspar took a pill and slept the sleep of the dead. Benny did not come. The next night, he took another, and again, no Benny. With one pill left, Gaspar elected to go it without help, just to see what happened. The ghost did not come. He would never take the third pill, and Benny would never haunt his dreams again. It was not so easy for Emile Griffith. Sleep became a playground for his fears. For years, Kid Paret would return at night, again and again. Sometimes Emile would be walking down the street in his dream and would reach to extend a handshake to a fan only to realize he now clasped the clammy dead hand of the Kid. Other times, he would be in an arena to watch a fight and would find an empty seat. He’d ask if the seat was taken and a voice would tell him no. He’d sit down before realizing that it was Benny’s voice that was talking. Even when awake, the neutral corner in which he had demolished the Kid became spooky. He would admit privately that he didn’t want to hurt anyone else in the ring. Emile’s style became more conservative. The press noticed. But he still won. In fact, Griffith would go on to become a legend. When he finally retired in 1977, 232 Epilogue he had won welter and middleweight titles a stunning six times and had fought more times at the Garden than anyone in history. Later, he would be considered one of the greatest boxers of any era. When the fourth (and current) iteration of Madison Square Garden opened in 1968, Griffith would be in its first fight event. After he retired, Emile Griffith got a job at the Secaucus youth detention facility, helping troubled kids. One of them, a sixteen-year-old named Luis Rodrigo, moved in with Griffith, but such things were not allowed and the ex-champ was fired. Griffith went on to adopt Luis (who still lives with him) and to train boxers by day and work at a bar by night. The big money was long gone, but Emile managed to keep his positive attitude and still made friends easily. He had since divorced a young dancer named Sadie (whom he’d married in 1971 and separated from a few years later). Now, he simply struggled to make ends meet, occasionally making appearances and always shaking hands with fans. In 1992 he was leaving a gay bar in New York when a bunch of thugs dropped him. They beat him savagely with pipes or clubs. He fought back, felt a guy’s nose go “pop” under his fist. These heavies had no idea who they were messing with—this wasn’t some old queen ripe for abuse. This was the ex-champion of the world. But there were too many of them. Griffith stumbled to a subway and rode in a delirium for hours before finding his way back to the apartment. He was taken to a hospital, near death, but he recovered. However, the mind is something that can’t be repaired at a hospital. Soon after, Griffith felt he was losing his. They called it boxer’s dementia. The past began to fog, the present slowed to a steady drift. He found that he couldn’t remember things. The ring battles had taken their toll. Research tells us that boxers suffer disproportionally from neurological damage. The scientific term for it is chronic traumatic brain injury (CTBI). The results are permanent and progressive. Symptoms include Parkinsonism , dementia, personality changes, and cerebellum dysfunction. The data is not precise: the...

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