A 1960 gold medalist in Rome, he overshadowed a young Muhammad Ali, then known as Cassius Clay. He was celebrated as much for his charisma as his boxing skills.
Nino Benvenuti, an Italian boxer who won the welterweight title at the 1960 Rome Olympics and was named the outstanding fighter of those Games over a certain teenage light-heavyweight named Cassius Clay, better known as Muhammad Ali, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 87.
His death was announced by the Italian Olympic Committee, which did not specify where he died.
Unlike Ali, a three-time world heavyweight champion, Benvenuti never became one of the world’s most recognized and socially relevant figures, but he was considered Italy’s greatest boxer — handsome and possessing elegance and power in the ring — and built his own exceptional career.
Outside the ring, according to Sports Illustrated, he read Hemingway, Voltaire and Steinbeck and listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in his Lincoln Continental on the way to fights. Primal and incandescent battles against the Hall of Fame middleweights Emile Griffith of the Virgin Islands and Carlos Monzon of Argentina turned into poignant friendships when his former antagonists became troubled. (Benvenuti himself was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1992).
Benvenuti was 119-1 as an amateur and winner of an Olympic gold medal. After turning professional in 1961, he built a record of 82-7-1 with 35 knockouts, and won the world light middleweight championship and the world middleweight championship twice. He retired in 1971 after losing for a second time to Monzon, when his corner threw in a white towel of surrender.
It was Benvenuti’s Olympic victory in his home country that carried the most meaning, he told The Ring magazine in 2016. Why? “Because it lasts forever,” he said. “I’m now a former middleweight champion of the world yet I’m still an Olympic gold medalist.”
