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Popular Culture Review
with the priest ironically responds, “Dr. Hooker, look at those clouds.” As with
Williams’s other athletes, Dick’s “glorious” career in sports does not assure him
of bright happiness, success, or even love. Though Dick is “a good-looking
boy.. . about twenty-three or four, tall and athletic in build'* (5), he “does not
share Heaven’s desire for social position” and, in fact, wants to escape her
“responsibility of having fine blood” (54). Advised by her mother to have
nothing to do with Dick, “whose people are so low, so common” (49), Heavenly
nevertheless tries to convince him to keep his job, curry favor with prominent
people in town, and, most of all, marry her.
But Dick has “a fund o f restless energy and an imagination which
prevents him from fitting into the conventional social pattern*" (5). Instead, he
wants Heavenly to go with him to his new job “or a Government levee project”
on the river (100). With the apt surname of Miles, Dick, understandably, loves
travel, distance, and ‘Vill never be able to hold a job” (47). Putting “social
position” and her own “laurels” over Dick’s wanderlust and love. Heavenly
resigns herself to marry Arthur Shannon, the scion of a wealthy family, but at
the end of Spring Storm, she is left by both young men to become a “porch
maiden” or old maid. Though Heavenly hopes that one or the other of her
former wooers might return, her chances for love seem slim. The glory and
garlands of Dick’s high school football career and his “athletic” stature clearly
brought more promise to Heavenly than to him. She realizes that a football star
does not always make a good husband, a lesson Maggie learns in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof
Football, with all the manly strength and vigor it denotes, is central to
understanding Brick in Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin
R oof In fact. Cat may be Williams’s most sports-intensive play. One of the key
relationships in the play, and a catalyst for almost every other, is Brick’s with
Skipper, articulated in terms of football and track. One of Williams’s erased
homosexuals (like Allan Grey in Streetcar or Sebastian Venable in Suddenly
Last Summer), Skipper loved Brick as Brick did him. But because of his guilt
over Skipper’s death. Brick refuses to sleep with his wife Maggie the Cat whom
he implicates in his fi*iend’s death. Jealous over Skipper, Maggie had conJfronted
him about his feelings for her husband, taunting him to sleep with her or to “tell
the truth.” After she “poured in his mind the dirty, false idea,” Skipper does
indeed sleep with her but shortly after he “broke in two like a rotten stick—
nobody ever turned so fast to a lush—or dried out so quick” (125). Fighting
Maggie’s accusation of being gay. Brick falls into a bottle, shutting himself off
fi*om her and Big Daddy.
In Cat, the wounded lover is also the wounded athlete. Framing and
symbolizing Brick’s love for Skipper, sports in Cat become a metaphor for selfdestruction in a Big Daddy-dominated culture. This is physicalized throughout
the play by Brick hobbling on a crutch after jumping hurdles on the high school
track at night. Attacking her husband for such foolish athleticism, Maggie