Tennessee Williams and Sports
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symbolically besmirching his golden gloves, the insignia of his previous wins,
with excrement. Like the Palooka’s illusions, Kilroy’s romantic dreams are
shattered, but even more devastatingly. For his final gesture Kilroy crosses out
the “is” of “Kilroy is here” and replaces it with ‘Svas.” Williams links Kilroy’s
degradation on the Camino to his mythic reputation as the prizefighting champ
and as the national soldier-hero. The unheroic boxer and has-been soldier,
Kilroy is reduced to an absurd palooka in his dual roles.
Football is vital to the plots of three Williams plays—an early one-act
work entitled “The Big Game” (1937); an early three-act play. Spring Storm,
that he wrote for a playwrighting class at the University of Iowa, and Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof (1955). Set in “a small m en’s ward in a city hospitalf the “Big
Game” contrasts two young men, each 20 years old, ^^ho have spent “two
months together” in the hospital. Tony Elson is a “college football star” who has
been hospitalized for a knee injury while Dave his fiiend, “a charity case,” has a
terminal disease. Like many other Williams’s athletes, Tony is filled with drive,
impatience, and foolish, untested illusions. All he knows is that \