A Question of Animals
From MURRAY KENIPTON
NEW YORK
MER1CAN television, already history's most 1-3k developed instrument for the distribution and exportation of contrived images of mayhem, List week achieved one unforgettable minute's transmission of the real thing.
The peace-loving citizens of the United States could sit en famine on a Saturday night and watch Benny Paret, welter-weight boxing cham- pion of the universe, beaten into the vegetable state by his challenger. A priest who was watch- ing television got up in haste to run the two blocks to Madison Square Garden and give Paret the last rites of his Church.
The American Broadcasting Company, know- ing artistry when it has captured it, immediately ran a film of the last round of this contest, with off-screen commentary by Emile Griffith, sur- vivor and new champion. There were complaints of want of taste; but under the circumstances, this was an act of comparative decency, since the sponsors had the alternative of keeping their cameras on the ring where the victim was being crated for dispatch to the hospital and brain surgery, which was given one chance in 10,000 of success. Paret's proprietors cried that Referee Ruby Goldstein had waited so long to pull Griffith off their fighter and stop the contest that they had sustained an unfair damage to prop- erty. 'That Goldstein, he cost me a champion,' said •Manuel Alfaro, Paret's manager.
The victim's mother, speaking from Havana, said, 'Boxing is a question of animals'; the sym- pathy of the United States survived even this suspicious indication of Fidelismo. Benny Paret himself had only recently promised to renounce his Cuban citizenship as a gesture against the terror which brutalises his homeland.
Boxing is an industry regulated by the State of New York. Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered his Boxing Commission to a remorse- less examination of the circumstances. The com- mission reported back in two days and remorse- less was the proper adjective for its investigation. No one, it assured the Governor, was to blame; the entire affair had been supervised by men of sensitivity so infinite that any reader of the report had to be surprised to find them associated with a fellow like Benny Paret. A distinguished physician with a retainer from the promoters offered the expert opinion that boxing is less dangerous than ski-ing.
The State Legislature sits this month in Albany proving again how wise Hamilton and Madison were to reserve so much responsibility for American affairs to state and local governments. The legislature is responsible for much of the glory of the American social welfare programme, which so often seems designed for every citizen who does not need social welfare.
Every American, as an instance, is entitled by law to a minimum wage of $1.25 an hour, the exception being Americans whose employers pay them less than $1.25 an hour. Whenever it comes to write a neW minimum wage into law, the legislature, after guaranteeing every teamster
(prevailing wage $3.65 an hour) his legal right to no less than $1.25, moves at once to exempt from its protection workers in steam laundries who earn $1.10 and farm labourers who earn 75 cents.
This reflects a social conscience with a minute scale of priorities. The last four rungs on the ladder of official sympathy arc, in descending order: dogs, migratory apple-pickers, cats and at the very bottom boxers.
By coincidence, Assemblyman Satriale, a pro- gressive Democrat, had earlier offered a plan for the relief and assistance of boxers. Before Paret's fatal injuries, Satriale's Bill would prob- ably have been rejected as a dangerous exercise at coddling the unworthy. Now the Assembly approved it among compliments to Satriale's abiding concern for the unfortunate.
His Bill was a perfected expression of what respectable society conceives to be the boxer's due. Assemblyman Satriale proposed a welfare fund financed by a tax of 1 per• cent. of the boxer's purse and 1 per cent. of the gross re- ceipts from his performance. The boxer's purse is based on a percentage of the gros; receipts; he could therefore thank the State for financing, two-thirds of its sympathy with his own money.
The State could only give the boxer his money back if he or his heirs could prove (1) their indigence and (2) his residence in New York State for three months prior to his disaster. If a boxer is a New York resident and able to pass the means test for relief he paid for in the first place and is killed in the ring, his heirs can claim $250 in funeral expenses. A non-resident's sur- vivors can expect up to $75 to ship the body home. Paret's purse from his last fight was $50.000, from which he would have been taxed $750 for his welfare fund. His widow, by proving herself a pauper, could get back $75 to ship the remains to Cuba. This is ample, because the night flight to Puerto Rico costs 547.50 and that would leave $27.50 for the fisherman who smuggles the body to Havana Among comparison's between Assemblyman Satriale and Henri Dumont, his colleagues emitted frequent demands that boxing be out- lawed entire. A standard technique for retaining public office is advocacy of prohibiting activities of which the public is ashamed but which it enjoys too much to give up; by crying for abolition, a legislator escapes the problem of thinking about practical regulation. In the same spirit, most speakers denounced the public, which, being everyone, is no one; there ,were no references to the television producers and the promoters whose enterprise does after all contribute to the growth of the State's economy.
Mrs. Benny Paret, even in her moment of sorrow, remained the only realist. She could not, she said, support any campaign to abolish her husband's former profession; for the likes of Benny Paret, there. was no other way to make money. He had been a Cuban sugar-cutter: had it not been for these things. America had nothing to offer his wife but a job in a laundry for $1.10 an hour and hardly as much to offer him.
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