Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer 2005 | Page 22

18 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