Nino Benvenuti was the greatest Italian boxer. His life between great friendships, glamour and cinema
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the character
The boxer who died at 87 had a brilliant career. Together with Primo Carnera he made boxing history. After retiring from the ring his life was characterized by continuous sentimental turbulence, tragedies and some acting experience
There is a photo that immortalizes the moment of greatest glory of Nino Benvenuti : it is in the streets of New York and shows a smiling tabloid with NINO MIDDLE CHAMP written in capital letters. Against all odds he had managed to defeat Emile Griffith and become world champion of the middleweights in the ring of Madison Square Garden, the temple of boxing. Handsome, smiling and tenacious, he felt on top of the world: America was paying him a deserved triumph and Thomas Thompson had written in Life: “No champion is as popular as Nino” . He had managed to fight with wisdom and malice, surprising his rival, who had climbed into the ring certain of destroying him. He was a champion incapable of giving up, Griffith, a warrior who was afraid of nothing and had on his conscience the death of Benny Kid Paret, a boxer who had had the idea of calling him maricon / faggot at the weigh-in. When he entered the ring he had massacred him, sending him into a coma with 26 consecutive blows for ten days before he breathed his last . But against Nino, Griffith was held back by a superior technique and a tactic made of lightning-fast jabs, which nipped in the bud every assault. That match inaugurated a historic rivalry that saw Nino lose in the rematch and then prevail again in the tiebreaker, with all of Italy glued to the radio.
And he started a genuine friendship between the two rivals, to the point that Griffith became the godfather of one of his children: another unforgettable photo shows Nino pushing the wheelchair in which his rival was reduced in his last days, moved by the respect and naturalness with which he had faced his homosexuality. He was probably the greatest Italian boxer, certainly the most famous together with Primo Carnera, with whom he wanted to become friends . He had a brilliant career: Olympic welterweight champion, world super welterweight champion and then world middleweight champion. In 1968 he was named Fighter of the Year, and the eleventh round of the match against Luis Rodríguez was judged Round of the Year in 1969. In Italy he had an excellent rival in Sandro Mazzinghi, who he managed to dominate, but he found his nemesis in Carlos Monzon, who destroyed him with a devastating KO in the eleventh round in front of the public of Rome and then ridiculed him in the rematch in Monte Carlo until his seconds threw in the towel in the third round . On that occasion Nino desperately tried to continue fighting, but luckily for him the referee stopped the fight before the punishment became irreparable: the Argentine was too strong, and over time Nino found the serenity to admit it. A true friendship was also born with Monzon, which continued when the latter was imprisoned for throwing his wife from the balcony after strangling her. When Monzon died in a car accident he rushed to Argentina to attend the funeral of the boxer who had dethroned him, and to those who reminded him of the horrible crime he had committed, he simply replied "he was a great champion", and that in a moment of jealousy, a man is capable of anything.
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He suffered a lot for love and was a proud man: this became, depending on the case, his limit and his strength. Since he was a child he had become a fervent anti-communist, when together with 350 thousand Istrians he was forced to abandon his land and all his belongings to the soldiers of Marshal Tito. He recounted that trauma in the book L'Isola che non c'è: Il mio esodo dall'Istria and has never made a secret of his right-wing political ideas: in 2020, on the occasion of the publication of a comic book that had him as the protagonist, Ignazio La Russa launched the idea of appointing him senator for life . After retiring from the ring, his life was characterized by glamour, continuous sentimental turbulence and tragedies, such as the suicide of one of his sons. He also had some experience as an actor: he mocked himself, aware of his acting limitations, but when he came to Rome, Quentin Tarantino asked to meet the handsome boxer who shared “the scene with Giuliano Gemma in 'Alive or Preferably Dead' by the great Duccio Tessari”.
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