Don't Weaken

The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is pleased and even a bit proud to have played a role in attracting the annual conference of the North American Society for Sport History to the University of Texas at Austin. Based on the latest projections, approximately 210 sport and physical culture historians will spend three full days in Austin giving papers, hearing papers, attending meetings, and enjoying the fellowship of like-minded folk from North America as well as the wider world beyond. What’s more, quite a few of the people coming to the conference are either coming early or staying over a few days the following week in order to use the resources of the Stark Center for research.

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Sorry to be away for so long but the combination of our work here at the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports and the month-long run-up to the annual Arnold Strongman Classic we direct for Jim Lorimer at the unimaginably large Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio left us with little time for blogging. However, before my iron game-lifelong pal David Webster actually leaves Texas to his home in the bosky dells of seaside Scotland I wanted to share with readers how fortunate Jan and I feel to have had him with us at the Stark Center since the middle of January. 

I first met David way back in 1964 in York, Pennsylvania, while I was living there and working as a managing editor of the York Barbell Company’s Strength and Health magazine, which by that time had been the leading iron game publication in the U.S. for over 30 years. As it happened, David was the organizer of a group of Highland Games athletes who were touring North America as part of a show made up of lesser-known sports such as synchronized motorcycle riding, cliff diving, and the Highland Games; and because the show was booked in Baltimore he had called the office of the York Barbell Company to say he would soon be in the area and would like to bring a group of his “heavies” to York to see the famous lifters and bodybuilders who trained there. As David was already a major figure in the strength sports he was invited to come, with “heavies,” and so the next morning he and his kilted laddies arrived at the York Gym for what turned out to be a fascinating visit. 
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One of the long-held dreams Jan and I have had for the Stark Center has been to share our materials—many of which have been given to us for that purpose–with the wider world of scholars and fans of physical culture and sports. For almost 30 years we’ve done that primarily by working personally with people who came to Austin to use the collection, although as time permitted we’ve also assisted people (who couldn’t make the trip) with research questions. However, now that the library side of the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports is operational, we’ve turned our attention to the process of making some of our holdings available as digital resources by scanning them so they can be viewed on-line and through the creation of “finding aids.” (A finding aid is a catalog and description of a collection used to assist scholars in planning a research visit.) Today, we’re launching a Research page on our website–a portal to these new digital resources. I suspect that you’ll find them just as amazing as I do. Since the general oversight of this aspect of our work at the Stark Center has been Jan’s responsibility, what follows is her explanation of how this has come about.
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Jan and I returned last night from a ten-day road trip that was one of the most interesting and rewarding we have ever made. The trip originated when Mark Henry and his wife, Jana, told us that the birth of their second child was scheduled for the morning of December 30th in New York City and that they’d like for us to be there just as we were for the arrival of their son, Jacob Todd Henry, who arrived four years and two months earlier. Accordingly, we booked plane tickets, but as we thought about the trip we began to wonder if it might be better for us to drive up to New York so that we could also drop off a large collection of nitrate-based films and film-clips in the New York area for restoration and transfer to a DVD format. Readers might wonder why we couldn’t just ship the films with our luggage, but the reason is that nitrate-based film is considered hazardous material and, as such, cannot be shipped without special permits and very expensive packaging.
In addition to our need to get the films to New York, we also realized that after the birth of Baby Henry we could drive from the New York City area over to State College, Pennsylvania, to pick up the books, files, and papers of Dr. Charles Yesalis, a prominent researcher in the area of anabolic/androgenic steroids who had recently retired from the faculty at Penn State. Probably the most widely-quoted steroid expert over the past 20 years, Dr. Yesalis had told us a month or six weeks ago that he wanted his collection to be housed at the Stark Center, and that it would fill about 40 “banker’s boxes.” What’s more, we thought, if we drove up in a truck there were several other items in the northeastern and eastern U.S. that we might be able to collect either going there or coming home.

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Apologies for returning to the same subject as the one used in the previous blog, but our 10-16-09 visitors were so unexpected, so diverse, so prominent, and so interesting that I ask for your forbearance as I briefly (for me, anyway) recount who came, why they came, and what happened.  It all got started when I received a call on Wednesday from Joe Hood, a local doctor I’ve known for over 30 years now.  Joe is a genuinely unusual man with one of the most remarkable memories I’ve ever seen in action.  He was also a very gifted strength athlete and he held the national record in the deadlift for quite a few years with 788 pounds in the 220 pound class of the American Drug-Free Powerlifting Association.  Hood says, and I believe, that he’s lifetime drug-free, and his best-ever lift at that weight was 793 pounds, exactly the same weight as the famous lift attributed for many decades to Germany’s Herman Goerner.  Goerner, like Hood, also weighed 220 pounds and stood 6’1”.  Eerie.  In any case, I was always pleased by the physical symmetry of these two men and by the symmetry of their records—one made in 1920 and the other made 65 years later.  Both men at their best were unusually broad-shouldered and relatively narrow-hipped, both had thighs which were a bit on the short side for their height and arms which were a bit on the long side, both were not particularly thick from front to back, both were drug-free.

For all these reasons, I was somewhat dismayed to learn—thanks to the research of Gherardo Bonini, Mark Kodya, and Joe Roark, which was published in 2006 in Iron Game History, the journal we produce under the auspices of  the Stark Center—that the historical record doesn’t support the claims made by Edgar Mueller and other authorities about Goerner’s 793 pound deadlift.  In the case of Joe Hood’s lift, of course, it was made in public, in a sanctioned powerlifting contest, and on a bar used by many other lifters.

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