Tennessee Williams and Sports
When we think of sports (and athletes) in American literature, a crew of
authors and their sports-driven works come to mind. Probably the quintessential
American author-sportsman is Ernest “Papa” Hemingway whose fiction
glamorized, almost in epic proportion, fishing, bullfighting, prizefighting, and
other manly contests. Running a close second in the race for author as sportsenthusiast is Jack London whose The Call o f the Wild sledges through dog
sledding, hunting, and other outdoor adventures; he who also penned a volume
entitled Jack London: Stories o f Boxing, Other American authors who highlight
sports in their work include William Faulkner whose Bear is frequently
anthologized in volumes on sports and literature; Bernard Malamud’s The
Natural (1952), a hard-hitting baseball story; Clifford Odets’s drama Golden
Boy (1939) focuses on prizefighting; and the series of John Updike’s Rabbit
Angstrom novels covering a variety of sports, especially basketball, golf, and
sailing. Even more recently, Steven Pressfield’s novel The Legend o f Bagger
Vance, mythologizing golf, has been made into a popular movie starring Matt
Damon and Will Smith.
By contrast, Tennessee Williams hardly seems in the same league with
these sports-drenched writers. In the popular imagination, Williams’s plays are
consumed with tales of sexual grotesqueries involving mad artist-maidens and
outcast stud lovers, all set in a lyrical, moon-drenched South. Closer to the truth,
though, sports and references to them play a symbolic role in Williams’s plays,
fiction, and even in a few of his poems contributing to the development of his
characters and plots. Williams incorporates a wide assortment of sports to
capture and to deconstruct the popular ethos surrounding them, including
swimming (“The Interval”; A Streetcar Named Desire; Suddenly Last Summer),
diving {Sweet Bird o f Youth; Night o f the Iguana), bowling {Streetcar), bicycling
{The Confessional), cock fighting {Summer and Smoke), croquet (“Three Players
of a Summer Game”), motorcycling {Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws), track
and/or football {Spring Storm; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), and prizefighting (“The
Palooka”; Camino Real), With the uncanny skill of an aficionado, Williams
almost always seems to match his characters with just the right sport at which
they must win or, more often than not, lose. Sadly but significantly, there are
very few heroic sports victories in his canon. Yet perhaps the most telling use of
sports in Williams’s works is to glorify the body beautiful or to encode its
decline, a dichotomy that numerous Hollywood versions of his scripts played
upon as he did himself in the performance of his own life and dreams.
Despite a sickly childhood, diphtheria, eye problems, an innate shyness,
and his relatively small frame, Williams was no stranger to the sporting arena.
He was encouraged, indeed alternately goaded and threatened, into them by his
blustering father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, who denigrated Williams as “Miss