How to improve writing (no.130)

I don’t go looking for these things. They find me. From a New York Times article about a bullfighter:

When it was over, the bull was dead, the rare prize of its ears were hoisted in Mr. Morante’s hands and a blizzard of white handkerchiefs waved in appreciation.

I see a mixed metaphor in the waving blizzard, but the glaring problem is were. I’m not sure that correcting the error in subject-verb agreement is much of an improvement: “the rare prize of its ears was hoisted” still sounds off to me.

I think this sentence is an occasion for the use of what Garner’s Modern English Usage calls preventive grammar:

The best recourse is a rewording. Why perpetrate a sentence that’s awkward but arguably defensible? A sentence that’s only defensible will raise doubts in the reasonable reader’s mind.

I hit on this fix:

When it was over, the bull was dead, Mr. Morante hoisted the rare prize of its ears, and white handkerchiefs waved in appreciation.

A bonus of this fix: it eliminates an unneeded instance of the passive voice.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts

[This post is no. 130 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of professional public prose. I had to add a serial comma to the Times sentence.]