Benvenuti vs Griffith: The 1967-68 Middleweight Trilogy That Changed Hands Three Times
Nino Benvenuti and Emile Griffith fought three fifteen-round title fights in New York in under a year, from the 1967 Fight of the Year at Madison Square Garden to a Shea Stadium rematch and a razor-close rubber match.
Between April 1967 and March 1968, Nino Benvenuti of Trieste and Emile Griffith of the U.S. Virgin Islands met three times for the middleweight championship of the world, each time over fifteen rounds in New York. The title changed hands after every fight, and the opening bout at Madison Square Garden was named Fight of the Year by The Ring.
Two Champions on a Collision Course
By the spring of 1967, both men arrived with résumés that would have satisfied most careers. Griffith, born in Saint Thomas in 1938, had won the welterweight championship three times before moving up to middleweight, where he held the WBA, WBC and Ring Magazine belts. His full life story, from the hat factory in Manhattan to his later years, is told in our separate Griffith biography; this piece stays inside the ring for the twelve months he shared with one opponent.
Benvenuti came from the other side of the Atlantic with Olympic credentials. At the 1960 Rome Games he won gold and, according to Boxing News, was chosen as the outstanding boxer of the tournament ahead of a teenage Cassius Clay. As a professional he had become a national figure in Italy, and the challenge to Griffith was his first chance to claim the undisputed middleweight crown in America.
April 17, 1967: Knockdowns Both Ways at the Old Garden
The first meeting took place at Madison Square Garden on April 17, 1967. In Italy the bout went out live on RAI radio in the middle of the night, and Quotidiano Sport puts the overnight audience at 18 million listeners. Inside the arena, the Italian-American crowd made itself heard from the opening bell.
Benvenuti struck first. In the second round he found Griffith with uppercuts and put the champion on the canvas, an early shock for the defending champion. Griffith survived, and two rounds later the momentum swung hard the other way: in the fourth he dropped Benvenuti and had the challenger in serious danger. Griffith later conceded that he lost his discipline at that moment; Boxing News quotes him as saying he "went right hand crazy" as he chased the finish and failed to land it.
Benvenuti recovered and boxed his way back into control over the second half of the fight. When the fifteen rounds were done, all three officials had him ahead, by margins of 10-5, 10-5 and 9-6 in rounds. Benvenuti was the new middleweight champion, and The Ring later named the contest its Fight of the Year for 1967.
September 29, 1967: Griffith Takes It Back at Shea Stadium
A rematch was inevitable, and it moved outdoors to Shea Stadium, the Queens ballpark that housed the New York Mets and the New York Jets. Griffith had promised a knockout in the build-up, and his camp, aware of the noise Benvenuti's supporters had produced in April, voiced concern about officials being swayed by the chanting of the champion's name.
This time Griffith fought the first half on the inside, crowding Benvenuti, roughing him up and denying him the space to box. Accounts of the night describe the Italian bleeding from the nose early and fading over the later rounds. The Italian outlet Quotidiano Sport reports that a body shot in the second round broke one of Benvenuti's ribs, a detail that helps explain why he struggled to sustain his output. In the fourteenth round Griffith put him down with a right hand, and Benvenuti protested the mandatory count.
The scoring was split. Referee Walsh, who also scored the fight under New York rules, had it even at 7-7-1. The two judges both returned 9-5-1 for Griffith, giving him a majority decision. With it he became, according to The Fight City, only the third man in history to regain the middleweight championship.
March 4, 1968: The Rubber Match in a Brand-New Building
The deciding fight returned to Madison Square Garden, but not to the same building. The fourth Garden had opened on February 11, 1968, and the third Benvenuti-Griffith fight was staged there less than a month later.
Benvenuti, who had lost the title while carrying an injury, was sharper in the rubber match. The pivotal moment came in the ninth round, when he knocked Griffith down for the second time in their series. That knockdown gave him a lead he protected through the championship rounds.
The official verdict was unanimous for Benvenuti, but the cards show how close the fight was. Two officials scored it 8-6-1 in rounds. The third had it level at 7-7-1 and broke the tie on supplementary points, 9-8, in the Italian's favour, according to Boxing News. Benvenuti had regained the WBA and WBC middleweight titles. Griffith did not accept the result easily; Boxing News quotes him as claiming that a decision in his favour would have led Benvenuti's fans to tear the Garden down.
Forty-Five Rounds, Three Title Changes
Taken together, the trilogy produced 45 rounds, four knockdowns and a title that switched owners after every fight. Benvenuti won two of the three, but none was one-sided: the first included a knockdown each way, the second turned on a late knockdown and a referee's even card, and the third was decided by a single round on one official's score.
Benvenuti went on to hold the middleweight championship until November 7, 1970, when Carlos Monzón stopped him in Italy in the twelfth round; Monzón beat him again in their rematch on May 8, 1971. Sources differ on how many successful defences Benvenuti made between the Griffith rubber match and Monzón: Boxing News counts four, while Quotidiano Sport gives five. Griffith, for his part, received four further world title opportunities in the years that followed, according to Boxing News, without winning a championship again.
Rivals, Then Family
The fights did not end the relationship. In 1980, Benvenuti asked Griffith to become godfather to one of his sons, and he later helped Griffith financially during difficult years. Griffith was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in its first class in 1990. Benvenuti died in May 2025 at the age of 87, with Italian coverage of his death returning, almost inevitably, to those three nights in New York.
Sources
- Benvenuti-Griffith was a trilogy for the ages, Boxing News (Jack Hirsch), September 17, 2024
- Sept. 29, 1967: Griffith vs Benvenuti II, The Fight City (Patrick Connor)
- Benvenuti and the epic encounters with Griffith at Madison Square Garden, Quotidiano Sport (Manuel Minguzzi), May 20, 2025
- Nino Benvenuti, Wikipedia, accessed October 2026
- Emile Griffith, Wikipedia, accessed October 2026
- Madison Square Garden, Wikipedia, accessed October 2026
