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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Now that we’re at least partly open and thus able to show people around, we’ve been having visitors to the Stark Center.  Sometimes the visitors are expected; sometimes they’re either not or at least not expected in the particular way they come.  For example, just over a week ago I was very surprised as I walked past the elevator lobby where our full-size copy of the Farnese Hercules is displayed.  What surprised me was that approximately 40 UT students were either sitting on benches or the floor or just standing in front of the immense, slowly-turning statue.  They were not talking and they were not moving around.  They were, in fact, quite still—as if they were at a religious service or a funeral.

That there were students looking at the Hercules was not what surprised me, however, since we’d been visited a few weeks earlier by a Professor of Art History who expressed his delight that the Stark Center—which is directly across the street from the Art Department—had on display a half dozen copies of classical statuary (discussed in an earlier blog) as well as the rotating giant standing hard by our outermost window.  “I’m going to assign my students to come here and look at these wonderful statues,” the professor said, and in a week or so I began to see a student or two or three sitting quietly in our lobby and taking an occasional note.  When I sat down by one of these first visitors, who was there alone, I asked him what his assignment had been and he said that the professor had instructed the class to spend at least 30 minutes contemplating the statues and to write down what they thought about what they were seeing.  The student said that the professor explained that he wanted their hand-written first impressions and not something they typed after the fact.

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My first message dealt with one aspect of the practical side of the Stark Center—the two miles of compacting shelves that are now being installed in our Archives area.  Today I’d like to touch on the aesthetic side of the Center—the side that speaks to beauty.  As most of you probably know, considerations of beauty, broadly defined, have been a part of physical culture for millennia, and as we’ve worked with the people who are helping with the design of our space we’ve done our best to make the Center beautiful as well as practically useful.

For this reason, I began a quiet campaign on the campus some years ago to convince the caretakers the Battle Casts to allow us to display some of them as part of our collection of physical culture material.  A brief history.  Beginning in the early years of the 20^th century, the Battle Casts—exact copies made of plaster of famous ancient statuary–were assembled over time at the University of Texas by William Battle.  Dr. Battle was a professor in the Department of Classical Languages here before going on to become the department’s chairman, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and finally President of the University.  For many years the Battle Casts were the property of the Classics Department, but they were later owned and displayed by the Humanities Research Center here on the campus.  For the last several years, however, they’ve been under the care of UT’s Blanton Museum of Art, and some are on display there.

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Every day or so, beginning today, I plan to breathe a metaphorical song into the air.  That song, as it does in the second and lesser-known stanza of a poem by H.W. Longfellow, will fall to earth “I know not where.”  I hope that my songs, like Longfellow’s, eventually fall to earth just as his did.

For the most part, I plan to sing about what we’re doing, have done, and hope to do at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports here at the University of Texas.  As I do this, I ask for forbearance and even feedback from those of you who stumble onto these halting efforts of mine.  As an aspiring blogger I couldn’t be more of a greenhorn.  In fact, although many will find it hard to believe, the blog I’m writing today is not only the first one I’ve ever written; it’s the first blog I’ve ever read.  In any case, I hope I can have even a tiny fraction of the success I once saw Bill Kazmaier have at the Braemar Games in Scotland three decades ago when he flung a 56-pound ring-weight over a bar set at 16’2” and broke a Highland Games World Record–in an event he’d not only never practiced but an event he’d never even seen.

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