Boys to Men Or Boys to Boys? Biff Loman and Brick Pollitt: Surviving Football in Death of a Salesman and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Critical Essay‪)‬

Robert Wilson, Ernest Hemingway's British safari guide in formerly British East Africa (Kenya today), reflects on the metamorphosis of his American client from coward to "fire eater" in a matter of hours, then generalizes about the immaturity of American men: "It's that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they're fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow" (150). The great white hunter lauds Francis Macomber's nascent masculinity and self-confidence, truly a man now who Wilson assumes "had probably been afraid all his life" (150). Witnessing men "come of age ... had always moved" Robert Wilson (150). F. Scott Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway also takes note of the youthful appearances of his thirty-something acquaintances, Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, and their chronic "restlessness," which Nick attributes to the "formless grace of our [American] nervous, sporadic games" (68). Sportsman Macomber, ex-Yale football star Buchanan, and the athletic Gatsby establish a mold for many literary athletes that follow them in American poetry, fiction, and drama in their narcissism, their vigorous resistance to growing into emotionally and psychologically healthy adults, and their clinging to their past sporting triumphs, whether fact or fantasy. The pattern of developmental issues found in both literary and actual athletes has received ample scrutiny from literary critics, social commentators, and psychological researchers. Dr. Tom House, former Major League pitcher, pitching coach, and current sport psychologist, describes the athlete's condition colorfully in his 1989 book, The lock's Itch, in which he coins the term "Terminal Adolescent Syndrome" to identify just what stimuli in the careers of professional athletes cause "[l]oving husbands and fathers [to] turn from Jekyll to Hyde in the blink of an eye, throwing sudden preadolescent temper tantrums or becoming hedonistic, narcissistic brats" (2); what makes "thirty-year-old men ... act the same way they did when they were thirteen" (3). House's colloquial description of Terminal Athletic Syndrome fits almost all literary "jocks" in sport-centered short stories, novels, and plays as well as those athletes featured in the morning paper, sometimes in the sports section, sometimes on the front page. Having commented elsewhere (Vanderwerken, "Gavin Grey") on several texts featuring aging former athletes trapped in their own actual or self-perceived glorious pasts, I focus here on two famous dramas ordinarily not viewed as sport-centered literature and two cases in point--ex-football stars Biff Loman, from Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1947) and Brick Pollitt, from Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955; 1974), who both suffer from House's Syndrome. These two wildly popular dramas position these "has-beens" at the center of attention in dramatizing each play's several meanings.