Emile Griffith, boxer with LI ties, is subject of Met opera

The squared circle comes to a storied stage Monday when composer Terence Blanchard's "Champion," about real-life bisexual boxer Emile Griffith, makes its New York premiere at the Metropolitan Opera.

International Boxing Hall of Famer Griffith — who died in 2013 at age 75 in a long-term care facility in Hempstead, and whose wake was held in Malverne and funeral mass in West Hempstead — was a three-time world champion welterweight and a two-time middleweight during his 1958-77 career.

He is nevertheless most remembered for coming out as bisexual in 2008 and for his televised 1962 Madison Square Garden bout with Benny “The Kid” Paret, whom he fatally injured in the ring. While Paret's death more than a week after the fight followed his homophobic slur to Griffith in Spanish during weigh-in, all concerned said the fatality was accidental. Even Paret's son, decades later, also assured a devastated Griffith.

Actor, trainer and former WBO world heavyweight champion Michael Bentt, a boxing consultant for "Champion" and the person who brought Griffith's story to music legend Blanchard, had known Griffith before pugilistic dementia finally overtook the older man. "When I first met Emile," Bentt, 57, a New York State Boxing Hall of Famer, tells Newsday, "I was 18, 19 years old and he was a trainer at Gleason's Gym," the famed facility then located in Manhattan. "I was a bit nervous, because this guy's a legend. And I went up to him and he was very, very kind and open and sweet."

Afterward, Bentt continued, "I would run into Emile at Golden Gloves fights or at smokers at Gleason's. He was very reserved, and always sharp as a tack in terms of how he dressed. His sexuality had nothing to do with me and nothing to do with how he presented himself."

As well, Bentt says, "We shared something similar in that he came from a very abusive background" — in Bentt's case, he says without specifics, involving a violent father. "So I could relate to that. I didn't know that at the time I met him, but I sensed it, if that makes sense. … There's a certain look that you can see [among fellow abuse victims], that these people have experienced something you've experienced. When you have that kind of connection, it's profound, man."

It was Bentt — whom five-time Grammy Award winner Blanchard has called "one of my best friends" — who introduced the composer to Griffith's story one day during a training session.

"We were on the track at UCLA and we were sparring … and for some reason, I asked Terence if he was familiar with this boxer named Emile Griffith. He said, no. And I went into Emile's background. About a year and a half later, I get a phone call from Terence. He said, 'Mike, I have some tickets for you to fly to St. Louis [where "Champion" premiered in 2013 at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis] to watch the play.' And I was, like, 'What play?' He said, 'The story you told me about Emile Griffith!' I had no idea."

Bentt was skeptical — "How are you going to do an authentic opera about boxing?" — and then he sat through the work, for which Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cristofer wrote the libretto. "Let me tell you," Bentt says, "several times when I was in that theater watching their performance, I couldn't stop crying. … I think the whole ... house [at the Met] when they see it are going to be profoundly impacted by this thing."