<iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-K3L4M3" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden">

Books

A portrait of a gay boxer

A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith, by Donald McRae, tells the fascinating tale of a boxer who loved men, and killed a man

3 October 2015

9:00 AM

3 October 2015

9:00 AM

A Man’s World: The Double Life of Emile Griffith Donald McRae

Simon & Schuster, pp.440, £20, ISBN: 9781471132346

I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor of California, Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown, who in 1963 called for ‘the abolition of this barbaric spectacle’ because another man had just been beaten to death in the ring. That man was Davey Moore, who had defended boxing before it killed him on the grounds that no one stopped the Indianapolis 500 when racing drivers get killed.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Black Friday sale

Subscribe today and get 10 weeks of The Spectator Australia for just $1

  • Unlimited access to spectator.com.au and app
  • The weekly edition on the Spectator Australia app
  • Spectator podcasts and newsletters
  • Full access to spectator.co.uk
Or

Unlock this article

REGISTER

Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £17 Tel: 08430 600033. Rose George’s books include Ninety Per Cent of Everything, about shipping, and The Big Necessity, about human waste.

You might disagree with half of it, but you’ll enjoy reading all of it. Try your first month for free, then just $2 a week for the remainder of your first year.


Comments

Black Friday sale

Subscribe today and get 10 weeks of The Spectator Australia for just $1

Already a subscriber? Log in

Close