Tennessee Williams and Sports
15
Prizefighting, one of the most aggressive sports, is also featured in
several of Williams’s plays, chiefly “The Palooka” and Camino Real. Possibly
written in the mid-1930s at the University of Iowa or earlier, but first published
in 2005, Williams’s one-act play “The Palooka” is set in a “dressing room o f a
boxing arena"’' where a “worn-out boxer in an old purple silk dressing robe"''
cynically tutors a “kid about to engage in his first professional fight"" (“Palooka”
29). In Ae lingo of “the fighting game,” the Palooka, the old boxer, critiques his
past foes and believes the Kid’s challenger is really “a sucker for a left
uppercut” (30). Most of the play, however, is devoted to the two fighters
lionizing a “light heavy-weight champ” named Galveston Joe w4io personified
all the virtues (“He wasn’t no Palooka”) and won all the financial rewards of the
sport. We hear that Joe left the ring a wealthy, successful businessman “who
made good on Wall Street” and in Argentina, too (33). The Kid confesses, “I
had his picture posted up in my bedroom,” and the Palooka elatedly recalls that
women “fought like wildcats to get a button off his vest or snatch a green
carnation fi’om his lapel” (34). As the Kid eulogizes Galveston Joe, the Trainer
enters to tell the Palooka that his fight is “on.” Walking “slowly, lifelessly
through the door,"" the tired old fighter goes off to his match, and another part of
the Kid’s lesson begins when the Trainer reveals that the palooka to whom the
Kid was talking was actually Galveston Joe himself, “the biggest has-been in the
racket” (35). Meanwhile, off stage, the crowd roars—“like feeding Christians to
the lions”—as the Palooka “with a glass chin” is soundly defeated.
As he had done in the “Mr. Olympics” episode of Not About
Nightingales, Williams plays up the dark side of sports by stressing that one of
its heroes is beaten physically and also psychologically through the illusions he
has had about his success in the sport. The defeated athlete’s self-image is
tragically tied to the game. The Palooka lives the life of his fiction—^the sports
hype—in the locker room by verbally sparring with the Kid. Yet the truth is that
the old fighter never acquired the wealth or security of his fantasized earlier
inflated identity (“Galveston Joe”) and had to switc