English 1010

Diagnostic/Benchmark Essay

You will have until Wednesday, Sept. 2nd to type a double-spaced, two-page essay on the topic below.  Keep in mind this diagnostic/benchmark allows the English Department to assess its composition program, so it will not be formally graded.  You will simply receive full credit for submitting the essay on time.  Failure to submit a diagnostic essay will result in a loss of all points for the assignment.

*Please hand in only your final draft.

*Your instructor may or may not require a second copy of your essay so find out what your instructor requires.

*Be sure that you’ve included the course title and number, course section number, your name, and your instructor’s name below.  Do not put any of this information on the paper itself.

Your name:____________________                    Course title and number___________________

Course section number____________________  Instructor’s name:___________________

Diagnostic/Benchmark Topic

After reading George F.  Will’s “Bearbaiting and Boxing,” explain the main idea Will advances before offering your own well-developed reasoning in terms of whether you agree or disagree with his argument.

George F. Will’s “Bearbaiting and Boxing”

For 150 years people have been savoring Macaulay’s judgment that the Puritans hated bearbaiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.  However, there are moments, and this is one, for blurting out the truth:  The Puritans were right.  The pain to the bear was not a matter of moral indifference, but the pleasure of the spectators was sufficient reason for abolishing that entertainment.

            Now another boxer has been beaten to death.  The brain injury he suffered was worse than the injury the loser in a boxing match is supposed to suffer.  It is hard to calibrate such things—how hard an opponent’s brain should be banged against the inside of his cranium—in the heat of battle.

            From time immemorial, in immemorial ways, men have been fighting for the entertainment of other men.  Perhaps in a serene, temperate society boxing would be banned along with other blood sports—if, in such a society, the question would even arise.  But a step toward the extinction of boxing is understanding why that is desirable.  One reason is the physical injury done to young men.  But a sufficient reason is the quality of the pleasure boxing often gives spectators.

            There is no denying that boxing, like other, better sports, can exemplify excellence.  Boxing demands bravery and, when done well, is beautiful in the way that any exercise of finely honed physical talents is.  Furthermore, many sports are dangerous.  But boxing is the sport that has as its object the infliction of pain and injury.  Its crowning achievement is the infliction of serious trauma on the brain.  The euphemism for boxing is “the art of self-defense.”  No.  A rose is a rose is a rose, and a user fee is a revenue enhancer is a tax increase, and boxing is aggression.

            It is probable that there will be a rising rate of spinal cord injuries and deaths in football.  The force of defensive players (a function of weight and speed) is increasing even faster than the force of ball carriers and receivers.  As a coach once said, football is not a contact sport—dancing is a contact sport—football is a collision sport.  The human body, especially the knee and spine, is not suited to that.  But football can be made safer by equipment improvements and rules changes such as those proscribing certain kinds of blocks.  Boxing is fundamentally impervious to reform.

            It will be said that if two consenting adults want to batter each other for the amusement of paying adults, the essential niceties have been satisfied, “consent” being almost the only nicety of a liberal society.  But from Plato on, political philosophers have taken entertainments seriously, and have believed the law should too.  They have because a society is judged by the kind of citizens it produces, and some entertainments are coarsening.  Good government and the good life depend on good values and passions, and some entertainments are inimical to these.

            Such an argument cuts no ice in a society where the decayed public philosophy teaches that the pursuit of happiness is a right sovereign over all other considerations;  that “happiness” and “pleasure” are synonyms, and that there is no hierarchy of values against which to measure particular appetites.  Besides, some persons will say, with reason, that a society in which the entertainment menu includes topless lady mud wrestlers is a society past worrying about.

            Some sports besides boxing attract persons who want their unworthy passions stirred, including a lust for blood.  I remember Memorial Day in the Middle West in the 1950’s, when all roads led to the Indianapolis Speedway, where too many fans went to drink Falstaff beer and hope for a crash.  But boxing is in a class by itself.

            Richard Hoffer of the Los Angeles Times remembers the death of Johnny Owen, a young 118-pound bantamweight who died before he had fulfilled his modest ambition of buying a hardware store back home in Wales.  Hoffer remembers that “Owen was put in a coma by a single punch, carried out of the Olympic (arena) under a hail of beer cups, some of which were filled with urine.”

            The law can not prudently move far in advance of mass taste, so boxing can not be outlawed.  But in a world in which many barbarities are unavoidable, perhaps it is not too much to hope that some of the optional sorts will be outgrown.