Magnified by TV

It was a rough and dirty fight, but most boxing fans had seen them rougher and tougher. The difference was that seldom had a nationwide TV audience been treated to so shocking a reminder of boxing's basic brutality. In the ring at Madison Square Garden, Welterweight Champion Benny ("Kid") Paret, 25, was battered unconscious by a furious twelfth-round assault from Challenger Emile Griffith.

Paret lay limp and still, blood running from his eyes and nose. The cameras zeroed in for an endless moment, and better than any ringsider, the stay-at-home boxing buff saw the tragic picture of a fighter who had been all but killed in the ring. Next day, after an operation to relieve the pressure on his damaged brain, doctors gave Benny Paret "one chance in 10,000" to live. While he struggled to survive, boxing rolled with the punches as it took one more public pasting.

On His Back. New York's Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller ordered an immediate investigation of the bout. Questions were asked in the British Parliament, the U.S. Congress got stirred up, and a bill to ban boxing was introduced in the state legislature of New York. The press, in the U.S. and Europe, sounded off with extravagant anger. "The most murderous world title fight in history," said the London Daily Sketch. "Is this the Saturday night pastime of a civilized people?" asked the New York Times in an editorial. "An unprecedented boxing scandal," agreed the Vienna Kurier. The New York Post called boxing "organized primitivism," and demanded that it be outlawed. "Professional boxing," reported the Vatican radio, "is a morally objectionable sport."

In Manhattan, fans, friends and relatives of ex-Champion Paret fanned the controversy with excited comment. Paret's hysterial wife, three months pregnant, called Griffith an "inhuman monster."

Paret's manager, Manuel Alfaro, assailed Referee Goldstein for failing to stop the bout sooner. "I was screaming 'Stop it! Stop it!'" said Alfaro. -"But he let the fight go on." Ringsiders, positioned near Paret's corner, could recall no such shouts.

Neither could Goldstein. "I'm usually accused of stopping fights too soon," said the veteran of 19 years and more than 500 fights as a referee. "My first thought is always for the fighter's safety. But this was a championship fight. I believe the champion should get the chance to lose his title on his back, not on his feet." Top Shape. Ringwise observers were more concerned over the fact that New York authorities allowed the fight to start in the first place. Dr. Alexander Schiff of the New York Athletic Commission insisted that "Paret entered the ring in top physical shape." But he had been knocked out twice in his three previous fights. A year ago, when he lost the welterweight title to Griffith in a 13-round knockout, it took his handlers several minutes to get him in condition to leave the ring. In a rematch last July, Paret regained the championship with an unpopular 15-round decision; at the end, his eyes were swollen shut and blood was streaming from his mouth. Then, stepping out of his class, Paret took on free-swinging Middleweight Champion Gene Fullmer last December.

In the twelfth round, after a series of wicked rights, Paret pitched to the canvas, lay rigid and quivering as his seconds struggled to revive him.

At week's end Referee Goldstein was absolved of blame by the state Athletic Commission, but the furor was far from over. In Los Angeles, for the second time in less than a week, a fighter was carried from the ring in a stretcher; ageless Archie Moore battered floundering Argentine Heavyweight Alejandro Lavorante through the ropes in the tenth round. This time the referee, Tommy Hart, jumped in to stop the fight, but as Moore was receiving the plaudits of the fight crowd, Lavorante collapsed off his corner stool.

Athletic Commission medics later sent the badly pummeled Lavorante to his hotel suffering from exhaustion and heavy body blows. And in Boston, Massachusetts boxing officials decided it was time to crack down, ordered an electroencephalograph test run on British Middleweight Terry Downes as a precautionary measure before his title bout this week with Paul Fender.

Professional boxing was likely to survive, as it has survived so many similar scandals before. But for the moment, the ritual of the Saturday night bloodbath was clearly on trial.

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