Champion is an opera in two acts and ten scenes with music by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Michael Cristofer.

[2] In 2011, the Whitaker Foundation of St. Louis provided the initial $200,000 leadership gift needed to fund the commissioning and development costs of the new work.

Luis, his adopted son and caretaker, reminds him to be ready for an important meeting with Benny Paret, Jr. Late 1950s: Emile is a young man in St. Thomas, the US Virgin Islands.

He wants to find his mother, Emelda, and make his fortune in America as a singer, a baseball player, and a hat designer.

Lonely and confused by his success, Emile finds his way to a gay bar in Manhattan, whose owner, Kathy Hagan, welcomes him to a frightening and also attractive world.

As a boy, his fundamentalist cousin Blanche forced him to hold cinderblocks above his head as punishment for 'having the devil inside him', which gave him his great physical strength.

He tries living it up, and, denying his own identity, he takes a young bride, Sadie, although everyone, including his mother Emelda, who remembers her own childhood back in the Islands, warns him against it.

He's now on a long losing streak of matches, and beginning to exhibit signs of "boxer's brain", or trauma-related dementia.

At its premiere, Champion received generally favourable critical reviews, with respect to the production, direction, and performances of the cast.

Several critics noted the coincidence of the production of Champion with then-current events in the USA related to violence against gay people, the attention given to basketball player Jason Collins (the first openly gay athlete with a major American sports team), and the ruling earlier in 2013 by the Supreme Court of the United States on the Defense of Marriage Act.