Unit 9
贺兰越石TEXT I
Who Killed Benny Paret?评价的英语
Text
Sometime about 1935 or 1936 I had an interview with Mike Jacobs, the prizefight promoter. I was a fledgling newspaper reporter at that time; my beat was education, but during the vacation ason I found mylf on varied assignments, all the way from ship news to sports reporting. In this way I found mylf 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 prizefights, 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.
我要看火车We discusd what to him was the only important element in successful promoting — how to plea the crowd. So far as he was concerned, there was no mystery to it. You put killers in the ring and the p
eople 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 ats. So you arched for the killers and sluggers and maulers — fellows who could hit with the force of a baball bat.
I asked Mr. Jacobs if he was speaking literally when he said people came out to e the killer.
"They don't come out to e a tea party," he said evenly. "They come out to e the knockout. They come out to e a man hurt. If they think anything el, they're kidding themlves."
Recently a young man by the name of Benny Paret was killed in the ring. The killing was en by millions; it was on television. In the twelfth round he was hit hard in the head veral times, went down, was counted out, and never came out of the coma.
大熊猫说明文
The Paret fight produced a flurry of investigations.Governor Rockefeller was shocked by what happened and appointed a committee to asss the responsibility. The New York State Boxing Commission decided to find out what was wrong. The District Attorney's office expresd 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 examinin
g 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 cau except the real one. Benny Paret was killed becau 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 himlf. Not every blow to the head will kill a man — but there is always the risk of concussion and damage to the brain. A prizefighter 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 ek to determine whether he should have intervened to stop the fight earlier. This is not where the primary responsibility lies. The primary responsibility lies with the people who pay to e 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 e a man stretched out on the canvas. This is the supreme moment in boxing. It is nonn to talk about prizefighting 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 blood squirts out of his no or eyes, when he wobbles under the attack and his pursuer continues to smash at him with poleax 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 enterpri and vehicle of entertainment. No one doubts that many people enjoy prizefighting and will miss it if it should be thrown out. And that is precily the point. By Norman Cousins
TEXT II
A Piece of Steak
With the last morl of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last bit of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and thoughtful way. When he aro from the table, he was oppres
d by the feeling that he was distinctly hungry. Yet he alone had eaten. The two
children in the other room had been nt early to bed in order that in sleep they might forget they had gone supperless. His wife had touched nothing, and had sat silently and watched him with troubled eyes. She was a thin, worn woman of the working class, though signs of an earlier prettiness were still there in her face. The flour for the gravy she had borrowed from the neighbor across the hall. The last two ha 'pennies had gone to buy the bread.
He sat down by the window on a rickety chair that protested under his weight, and quite mechanically he put his pipe in his mouth and dipped into the side pocket of his coat. The abnce of any tobacco made him aware of his action, and with a frown for his forgetfulness he put the pipe away. His movements were slow, almost clumsy, as though he were burdened by the heavy weight of his muscles. He was a solid-bodied, stolid-looking man, and his appearance did not suffer from being overpreposssing. His rough clothes were old and shapeless. The uppers of his shoes were too weak to carry the heavy resoling that was itlf of no recent date. And his cotton shirt, a cheap, two-shilling affair, showed a frayed collar and ineradicable paint stains.
But it was Tom King's face that advertid him unmistakably for what he was. It was the face of a typi
cal prizefighter; of one who had put in long years of rvice in the squared ring and by that means, developed and emphasized all the marks of the fighting beast. It was distinctly a threatening appearance, and that no feature of it might escape notice, it was clean-shaven. The lips were shapeless and made his mouth harsh like a deep cut in his face. The jaw was aggressive, brutal, heavy. The eyes, slow of movement and heavy-lidded, were almost expressionless under the shaggy brows. Sheer animal that he was, the eyes were the most animal-like feature about him. They were sleepy, lionlike — the eyes of a fighting animal. The forehead slanted quickly back to the hair, which, clipped clo, showed every swelling of an evil-looking head. A no, twice broken and molded variously by countless blows, and a cauliflower ear, permanently swollen and distorted to twice its size, completed his adornment, while the beard, fresh-shaven as it was, sprouted in the skin and gave the face a blue-black stain.
Altogether, it was the face of a man to be afraid of in a dark alley or lonely place. And yet Tom King was not a criminal, nor had he ever done anything criminal. Except for brawls, common to the boxing world, he had harmed no one. Nor had he ever been known to start a quarrel. He was a professional, and all the fighting brutishness of him was rerved for his professional appearances. Outside the ring he was slow-going, easy-natured, and, in his younger days, when money was plenti
ful, too generous for his own good. He bore no grudges and had few enemies. Fighting was a business with him. In the ring he struck to hurt, struck to maim, struck to destroy; but there was no hatred in it. It was a plain business
proposition. Audiences asmbled and paid for the spectacle of men knocking each other out. The winner took the big end of the pur. When Tom King faced the Woolloomoolloo Gouger, twenty years before, he knew that the Gouger's jaw was only four months healed after having been broken in a Newcastle bout. And he had played for that jaw and broken it again in the ninth round, not becau he bore the Gouger any ill will but becau that was the surest way to put the Gouger out and win the big end of the pur. Nor had the Gouger borne him any ill will for it. It was the game, and both knew the game and played it.
The impression of his hunger came back on him.
"Blimey, but couldn't I go a piece of steak!" he muttered aloud, clenching his huge fists.
"I tried both Burke's an' Sawley's", his wife said half apologetically. "An' they wouldn't?" he demanded.
"Not a ha'penny. Burke said —" She faltered.
"G'wan! Wot'd he say?"
"As how 'e was thinkin' Sandel 'ud do ye tonight, an' as how yer score was comfortable big as it was."
反木桶原理Tom King grunted but did not reply. He was busy thinking of the bull terrier he had kept in his younger days to which he had fed steaks without end. Burke would have given him credit for a thousand steaks —then. But times had changed. Tom King was getting old; and old men, fighting before cond-rate clubs, couldn't expect to run bills of any size with the tradesmen.
He had got up in the morning with a longing for a piece of steak, and the longing had not died down. He had not had a fair training for this fight. It was a drought year in Australia, times were hard, and even the most irregular work was difficult to find. He had had no sparring partner, and his food had not been of the best nor always sufficient. He had done a few day's navvy work when he could get it and he had run around the Domain in the early mornings to get his legs in shape. But it was hard, training without a partner and with a wife and two kiddies that must be fed. Credit with the tradesmen had undergone very slight expansion when he was matched with Sandel. The cretary of the Gayety Club had advanced him three pounds —the lor's end of the pur —and beyond that had r
efud to go. Now and again he had managed to borrow a few shillings from old pals, who would have lent more only that it was a drought year and they were hard put themlves. No — and there was no u in disguising the fact — his training had not been satisfactory. He should have had better food and no worries. Besides, when a man is forty, it is harder to get into condition than when he is twenty.
"What time is it, Lizzie?" he asked.
His wife went across the hall to inquire, and came back.
"Quarter before eight."下腹胀气
"They'll be startin' the first bout in a few minutes," he said. "Only a tryout. Then there's a four-round spar 'tween Dealer Wells an' Gridley, an' a ten-round go 'tween Starlight an' some sailor bloke. I don't come on for over an hour."
At the end of another silent ten minutes he ro to his feet.
浓荫的意思"Truth is, Lizzie, I ain't had proper trainin'."
He reached for his hat and started for the door. He did not offer to kiss her — he never did on going out — but on this night she dared to kiss him, throwing her arms around him and compelling him to bend down to her face. She looked quite small against the massive bulk of the man. "Good luck, Tom," she said. "You gotter do 'im.
"Ay, I gotter do 'im," he repeated. "That's all there is to it. I jus' gotter do' im."
He laughed with an attempt at heartiness, while she presd more cloly against him. Across her shoulders he looked around the bare room. It was all he had in the world, with the rent overdue, and her and the kiddies. And he was leaving it to go out into the night to get meat for his mate and cubs —not like a modern workingman going to his machine grind, but in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it.
电脑重装系统教程"I gotter do 'im," he repeated, this time a hint of desperation in his voice. "If it's a win, it's thirty quid —an' I can pay all that's owin', with a lump o' money left over. If it's a lo, I get naught — not even a penny for me to ride home on the tram. The cretary's give all that's comin' from a lor's end. Good-by, old woman. I'll come straight home if it's a win."
"An' I'll be waitin' up," she called to him along the hall.
It was full two miles to the Gayety, and as he walked along he remembered how in his palmy days —he had once been the heavyweight champion of New South Wales — he would have ridden in a cab to the fight, and how, most likely, some heavy backer would have paid for the cab and ridden with him. There were Tommy Burns and that Yankee, Jack Johnson — they rode about in motorcars. And he walked! And, as any man knew, a hard two miles was not the best preliminary to a fight. He was an old un and the world did not wag well with old uns. He was good for nothing now except navvy work, and his broken no and swollen ear were against him even in that. He found himlf wishing that he had learned a trade. It would have been better in the long run. But no one had told him, and he knew, deep down in his heart, that he would not have listened if they had. It had been so easy. Big money — sharp, glorious fights — periods of rest and loafing in between — a following of eager flatterers, the slaps on the back, the shakes of the hand, the toffs glad to buy him a drink for the privilege of five minutes' talk — and the glory of it, the yelling hous, the whirlwind finish, the referee's "King wins!" and his name in the sporting columns next day.
