English Composition 1101
Write a carefully constructed essay in which you consider the facts and responsibilities of those involved and bystanders as well as presented in articles by Norman Cousins and Norman Mailer. You may also incorporate evidence from any other additional source material you consulted. Be sure to cite any sources in your work.
Reading a Cause-and-Effect Analysis with a Critical Eye
Once you have written a draft (or two or three) of your essay, it’s always wise to ask someone else
to look over what you’ve written. Ask readers where they find your analysis clear and convincing,
what specific evidence they find most effective, and where they think you need more (or less)
explanation. Here are some questions to keep in mind when checking over a cause-and-effect
analysis.
PURPOSE AND AUDIENCE.
Why is the reader being asked to consider these
particular causes or effects? Is the intended audience likely to find the analysis plausible as well as
useful? What additional information might readers need?
ORGANIZATION.
Does the essay emphasize causes or effects? Should it give more (or
less) attention to either? Are causes and effects presented in a logical sequence?
CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.
Does the essay analyze causes and effects in
chronological order where appropriate? Does it consistently link cause to effect, and effect to
cause?
REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER.
Where effects are known but causes
are uncertain, is it clear what chain of events most likely led to the effect(s) in question? Are those
events presented in reverse chronological order? If not, how can the order of events be clarified?
THE POINT.
What is the analysis intended to show? Is the point made clearly in a thesis
statement? How and how well does the analysis support the point?
TYPES OF CAUSES.
How well are the significant causes analyzed—the immediate
cause, the most important remote causes, the main cause, and the most important contributing
causes? What other causes (or effects) should be considered?
CAUSE OR COINCIDENCE?
At any point, is a coincidence mistaken for a cause?
Are all of the causes necessary to produce the intended effects? Do they have the power to
produce those effects?
VISUALS.
Are charts, graphs, or diagrams included to clarify causal relationships? If not,
would they be helpful? Are all visuals clearly and appropriately labeled?
WHO KILLED BENNY PARET?
Norman Cousins
Norman Cousins (1915-1990) was born in Union City, New Jersey, and graduated from Columbia
University’s Teachers College in 1933. He began his career in journalism writing for The New York
Evening Post and Current History magazine. In 1940 Cousins joined the Saturday Review, where he served
as editor from 1942 to 1978. Cousins lectured widely on world affairs, was a social critic and a strong
advocate of nuclear controls, and arranged for victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to come to the
Untied States for medical treatment. From 1978 until his death, he was an adjunct professor in the
department of Psychiatry and biobehavioral science at U.C.L.A Medical School. Cousins published
numerous books, including many urging a positive outlook to combat illness: Anatomy of an Illness (1979),
about his own struggle with a life- threatening form of arthritis; Human options: An Autobiographical
Notebook (1981); Healing and Belief (1982); The Healing Heart: Antidotes to Panic and Helplessness
(1983); The Pathology of Power (1987); and his last book, about the effect of the emotions on the body’s
resistance to disease, Head First: The Biology of Hope (1989). In his 1962 essay “ Who Killed Benny
Paret?” Cousins Investigates the causes of a boxer’s death. In answering the question posed by his essay’s
title, Cousins takes a strong stand against violence in sports.
Sometime about 1935 or 1936 I had an interview with Mike Jacobs, the prize- fight
promoter. I was a fledgling reporter at that time; my beat was education but during the
vacation season I found myself on varied assignments, all the way from ship news to
sports reporting. In this way I found myself sitting opposite the most powerful figure in
the boxing world.
There was nothing spectacular in Mr. Jacobs’ manner or appearance; but when he
spoke about prize fights, he was no longer a bland little man but a colossus who sounded
the way Napoleon must have sounded when he reviewed a battle. You knew you were
listening to Number One. His saying something made it true.
We discussed what to him was the only important element in successful
promoting- how to please the crowd. So far as he was concerned, there was no mystery to
it. You put killers in the ring and the people filled your arena. You hire boxing artists-
men who are adroit at feinting, parrying, weaving, jabbing, and dancing, but who don’t
pack dynamite in their fists- and you wind up counting your empty seats. So you searched
for the killers and sluggers and maulers- fellows who could hit with the force of a
baseball bat.
I asked Mr. Jacobs if he was speaking literally when he said people came out to
see the killer.
“They don’t come out to see a tea party,” he said evenly. “They come out to see
the knockout. They come out to see a man hurt. If they think anything else, they’re
kidding themselves.”
Recently, a young man by the name of Benny Paret was killed in the ring. The
killing was seen by millions; it was on television. In the twelfth round, he was hit hard in
the head several times, went down, was counted out, and never came out of the coma.
The Paret fight produced a flurry of investigations. Governor Rockefeller was
shocked by what happened and appointed a committee to assess the responsibility. The
New York State Boxing Commission decided to find out what was wrong. The District
Attorney’s office expressed its concern. One question that was solemnly studied in all
three probes concerned the action of the referee. Did he act in time to stop the fight?
Another question had to do with the role of the examining doctors who certified the
physical fitness of the fighters before the bout. Still another question involved Mr. Paret’s
manager; did he rush his boy into the fight without adequate time to recuperate from the
previous one?
In short, the investigators looked into every possible cause except the real one.
Benny Paret was killed because the human fist delivers enough impact, when directed
against the head, to produce a massive hemorrhage in the brain. The human brain is the
most delicate and complex mechanism in all creation. It has a lacework of millions of
highly fragile nerve connections. Nature attempts to protect this exquisitely intricate
machinery by encasing it in a hard shell. Fortunately, the shell is thick enough to
withstand a great deal of pounding. Nature, however, can protect man against everything
except man himself. Not every blow to the head will kill a man- but there is always the
risk of concussion and damage to the brain. A prize fighter may be able to survive even
repeated brain concussions and go on fighting, but the damage to his brain may be
permanent.
In any event, it is futile to investigate the referee’s role and seek to determine
whether he should have intervened to stop the fight earlier. That is not where the primary
responsibility lies with the people who pay to see a man hurt. The referee who stops a
fight too soon from the crowd’s viewpoint can expect to be booed. The crowd wants the
knockout; it wants to see a man stretched out on the canvass. This is the supreme moment
in boxing. It is nonsense to talk about prize fighting as a test of boxing skills. No crowd
was ever brought to its feet screaming and cheering at the sight of two men beautifully
dodging and weaving out of each other’s jabs. The time the crowd comes alive is when a
man is hit hard over the heart or the head, when his mouthpiece flies out, when the blood
squirts out of his nose or eyes, when he wobbles under the attack and his pursuer
continues to smash at him with pole- axe impact.
Don’t blame it on the referee. Don’t even blame it on the fight managers. Put the
blame where it belongs- on the prevailing mores that regard prize fighting as a perfectly
proper enterprise and vehicle of entertainment. No one doubts that many people enjoy
prize fighting and will miss it if it should be thrown out. And that is precisely the point.
The Death of Benny Paret —Norman Mailer
Paret was a Cuban, a proud club fighter who had become welterweight champion because of his unusual ability to take a punch. His style of fighting was to take three punches to the head in order to give back two. At the end of ten rounds, he would still be bouncing, his opponent would have a headache. But in the last two years, over the fifteen-round fights, he had started to take some bad
maulings.This fight had its turns. Griffith won most of the early rounds, but Paret knocked Griffith down in the sixth. Griffith had trouble getting up, but made it, came alive and was dominating Paret again before the round was over. Then Paret began to wilt. In the middle of the eighth round, after a clubbing punch had turned his back to Griffith, Paret walked three disgusted steps away, showing his hindquarters. For a champion, he took much too long to turn back around. It was the first hint of weakness Paret had ever shown, and it must have inspired a particular shame, because he fought the rest of the fight as if he were seeking to demonstrate that he could take more punishment than any man alive. In the twelfth, Griffith caught him. Paret got trapped in a corner. Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin. I was sitting in the second row of that corner—
they were not ten feet away from me, and like everybody else, I was hypnotized. I had never seen one man hit another so hard and so many times. Over the referee’s face came a look of woe as if some spasm had passed its way through him, and then he leaped on Griffith to pull him away. It was the act of a brave man. Griffith was uncontrollable. His trainer leaped into the ring, his manager, his cut man, there were four people holding Griffith, but he was off on an orgy, he had left the Garden, he was back on a hoodlum’s street. If he had been able to break loose from his handlers and the referee, he would have jumped Paret to the floor and whaled on him there. And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something
happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, “I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,” and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him. He began to pass away. As he passed, so his limbs descended beneath him, and he sank slowly to the floor. He went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down, he went down like a large ship which turns on end and slides second by second into its grave. As he went down, the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy ax in the distance chopping into a wet log.
