Remembering Bennie Briscoe
When just about anyone thinks of the quintessential “Philly” boxer, people’s minds jump straight to Rocky Balboa. But with all due respect to Sir Stallone, Bennie Briscoe was the real deal. “Bad Bennie”, who passed away in a Philadelphia hospice on December 28th, was the ruling authority among Middleweights during his professional career, which spanned more than two decades and nearly 100 fights. Briscoe was 67 years old, but fought professionally for 21 years from 1962 to 1982, is considered the top-rated middleweight of his era, and compiled a professional record of 66-24-5, with 53 knockouts.
But Briscoe went a long way before becoming a professional boxer, and fought to an astounding record of 70-3 as an amateur. In much the same vein as Rocky, both in size (Briscoe stood only 5’9’’) and as a “Philadelphia fighter”, Briscoe was known especially for his toughness and strong, powerful body-punching—HBO boxing analyst Harold Lederman once referred to Briscoe as “The meanest man I ever saw in the ring.” Much the same way that Briscoe refused to pull any punches in the ring, he didn’t pull any fights either: Briscoe fought any and all comers.
Although Briscoe is considered by many to be one of the greatest boxers to never win a World Title, he competed unsuccessfully for the title on three separate occasions. Marvin Hagler (62-3-2), Vito Antuofermo (50-7-2), Rodrigo Valdéz (#29 on Ring Magazine’s 100 Greatest Punchers of All Time), Emile Griffith (85-24-2), and Carlos Monzón (87-3-9) are all Middleweight champions that Briscoe didn’t shy away from and squared off in the ring with. But tragically for the hard-punching Philadelphian, there was only one World Title to go around for everyone at the Middleweight, 160-pound level for most of Briscoe’s career. Likewise, Briscoe’s one-time promoter J Russell Peltz famously commented at Briscoe’s retirement party in 1983 that: “There was a Bennie Briscoe in every town in the country, somebody that nobody wanted to fight. And Bennie fought all those guys, all those tough black guys that nobody would fight.”
The closest Bad Bennie ever came to the World Title was in 1972 against Carlos Monzón, even while recovering from hepatitis, in a fight in Monzón’s native Buenos Aires. Briscoe floored the Champ in the 9th round, but Monzón barely survived the shot to win a decision—causing Briscoe’s trainer Quinzell McCall to proclaim that, “We were one punch away from the world championship.” Briscoe also paid a silent homage to his managers Jimmy Iselin and Arnold Weiss by fighting with a Star of David on his shorts.
Bad Bennie is currently honored as #34 on Ring Magazine’s Greatest Punchers of All Time, and the tragedy is not that the hard-punching Philadelphia boxer passed away late last December, but that so few people will have heard the story of such an important, hard-knuckled piece of boxing history.
