Sport: Death of Griffo

Thirty-four years ago a small, mobile man pushed aside the swinging doors of a Manhattan barroom and strode to the middle of the smoky, beery room. He unfolded a snowy clean handkerchief; spread it neatly on the dirty floor, stood on it.

“‘Oo’ever knocks me off this ‘and-kerchief,” he announced, “I buys a drink for. ‘Oo’ever don’t buys one for me.”

Befuddled strong men advanced greedily, baring hairy arms. The first one swung viciously. The stranger ducked neatly, picked up the handkerchief, announced his would be whiskey.

How many thousand drinks of whiskey were thus won by Alfred Griffith, Australian immigrant, is not recorded. Several thousand too many, certainly. He was young Griffo, some say the fastest, cleverest fisticuffer ever known. He never won a championship. He trained for prize fights by walking with increasing unsteadiness from the clean white handkerchief to the beer-slopped bar top.

Last week Young Griffo died. He died in a basement room, where he had lived for ten years an object of Rose Collins’ charity. She remembered the lean days long ago when her husband kept a Manhattan saloon and trade was treacherous, until Young Griffo stumbled through the swinging doors and spread his handkerchief. Barflies & roustabouts swarmed to the challenge. Griffo made the Collins fortune. Widow Collins remembered.

From this gloomy basement Young Griffo walked each day to his idler’s post near the swirling corner of Broadway and 42nd St. Sporting men, theatre men, fighters, promoters, touts, hangers-on knew Griffo.

“Hello Griff.”

“Hello Al.” Griffo called everybody Al. Usually they stopped and gave him something. Griffo was grateful; he never begged. Even newsboys gave him papers which he perused gravely. Griffo could not” read, but he liked the pictures. He could not even read the tattered bunch of clippings he kept back in the basement room. Someone had taught him to recognize his name in print.

The clippings told of brutal, better days when Griffo fought four champions, George Dixon, Kid Lavigne, Jack McAuliffe, Joe Gans. Griffo never met a better fighter except alcohol. On the day of his fight with Dixon for the featherweight championship (Griffo weighed 120) he disappeared; was snatched out of a saloon late in the afternoon; boiled out in a Turkish bath; held Dixon to a desperate draw.

He spent all his money immediately after a fight; chiefly on liquor. Sometimes he committed petty crimes and begged the judge in court to send him up for 30 days in order that enforced abstinence might prepare him at least partially for his next encounter. Again and again he went drunk to the ring; and again and again just failed to crush great champions. In 1897 he made the final botch that removed him from serious consideration in the ring. Matched against one Tommy Tracy in St. Louis, he escaped to a saloon. Hours afterward his backers found him; shoved him into a buggy; raced for the arena. A train hit the buggy, killing two. Griffo stumbled into the ring drunk, dazed. The bell rang. Griffo, fumbling a towel, swayed to the centre of the ring, bent down to spread the towel. Tracy, ignorant of the rules of the handkerchief trick, hit him a shattering blow behind the ear. Griffo was out. Griffo swelled to 235 pounds before he died. For years too fat for the handkerchief trick, he never lost the lightning of his hand and eye. To the day of his death he could catch a fly in flight between his thumb & forefinger. The day of his death, like most of the days of his life, found Griffo without a dime. Money was minted to his memory. In an imposing white metal casket, gift of Tex Rickard, Griffo was buried from the consequential Madison Avenue Baptist Church. The funeral throng was mixed from the brave days of old; tottering gray figures forgotten by the sport world, women who remembered, fighters he had knocked senseless. A newspaperman reported James J. Corbett, onetime heavyweight champion of the world, as having said, kneeling beside the casket: “The zephyr of all ring-time! The only one that ever hit him was Death.”