As for Joe’s influence on the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, it’s not an exaggeration to say that had it not been for the generosity of Joe Weider there would be no Stark Center. No Joe and Betty Weider Museum filled with the paintings and sculptures they collected over the years and gave to us so we could share them with the wider world. Besides the art collection, Joe pledged $2,000,000 to allow us to expand the work we’ve done at the university, and their support of our dream gave us the courage to approach The University for the space in which to build our research center and to approach the Stark Foundation for the $5,500,000 to actually build it.

Joe Weider was Jewish, but he was also our patron saint.

Time on the “Forty Acres” passed for Coach and me, and after two more years he’d put his team on a path toward the dominance they’d maintain over the next couple of decades and I’d decided to put down my racket and focus all my attention on weightlifting.  By that time I’d grown to 240 pounds and become larger than every man on the football team but one, who weighed 245.  This was only the late 50s, remember, and while I’d been assiduously doing the pulls, squats, and presses that gradually thickened my muscles the players on the UT football team were only running, doing calisthenics, running, and, of course scrimmaging and playing games—plus more running.  They grew very little, of course, not having been introduced to the transformative magic of progressive resistance exercise.

By 1960 I weighed approximately 270 pounds.  Meanwhile, after a terrific season in 1959 when they went 9-2 and ranked #4 in the nation the UT football team dropped to 7-3-1 in 1960 and fell to #17 by the end of the season.  In any case, early in 1961 the word came down one day that Coach wanted me to come to his office.  “What could this be about?” I wondered aloud to my training partners, one of whom joked that Coach probably wanted to check on whether I had any remaining eligibility.  But of course that was not it.  Instead, Coach shook my hand, asked me to sit down, and said he wanted to talk to me, “off the record.”  He went on to say that he’d heard about me from some of his players, who were friends of mine, and that he’d watched me play tennis a couple of times.  “You’re an athlete,” he said, “and what I’d like for you to do is to tell me why my players should be lifting heavy weights like you do.  You probably know that the only weights our head trainer has our boys use are really light—never more than 40 pounds in any lift and not very often.”

I tried not to let Coach see how pleased I was by his question, and as calmly as I could I began to lay out the arguments that I’d absorbed from the pages of the “muscle magazines” I avidly read at that time, especially Strength & Health.  I said that I believed multi-joint, heavy weight training was the very best thing his men could be doing as it would increase their bodyweight as well as their explosive power, and I explained that in my own case I was able to jump a little higher at 270 pounds than I could when I began training with weights at about 195.  Coach was listening carefully, and so I also told him about the many great athletes who trained with weights—the decathlete Bob Richards, the shot putters Parry O’Brien and Bill Nieder, the baseball player Jackie Jensen, the basketball player Wilt Chamberlain, and the All-American football players Stan Jones, Piggy Barnes, Jim Taylor, and Billy Cannon.  “Cannon,” Coach said, shaking his head, “I know they say he’s been lifting heavy for years but when I saw films of him I couldn’t believe his speed.  Back when I played all my coaches told me that lifting heavy weights was the worst thing I could do—that they’d tie me up so I couldn’t even comb my hair and that they’d make me stiff and slow.  I’d like to have a slow boy like Cannon myself.”

Frank Medina

Encouraged, I then went on to explain how Cannon had begun his heavy work with weights with all his high school teammates in Louisiana during the summer before his senior year, and how the team had gone undefeated that fall and Cannon in the spring had won state in the hundred yard dash as well as the shot put—and that he’d gone on and done the same thing at LSU once Coach Paul Dietzel was convinced to put the whole team on a heavy program with the weights.  Coach Royal had been listening carefully, but then he really surprised me by saying that he had to be careful making any changes in his team’s training program because the head trainer, Frank Medina, was dead set against lifting heavy weights.  “Frank has a lot of support here on campus, and if I pushed for a complete change I know he’d push back.  And if we did make a change and we had some injuries or a bad year it would all come back on me.”

I could hear what Coach was saying, as I’d had a run-in with Medina myself a few years earlier when I went to see him about a back injury I’d sustained playing tennis in my sophomore year.  The tennis players almost never visited the training room because we knew it was mainly for football, so when I walked in I introduced myself and my problem to Medina, who lacked two inches of being five feet tall.  “I know who you are, Todd,” he said with a scowl.  “You’re the weightlifter.  No wonder you’re having problems with your back.  Just look at you.  If you keep lifting it’ll just get worse.  So stop it and don’t come back with any problems unless you stop lifting those weights.”  As evidence that Coach was truly leery of countermanding his head trainer, he didn’t make the change to heavy training until several years later.

By that time I’d begun work on my doctoral degree, and I was still training hard as a weightlifter and beginning to pay some attention to the new kid on the block—powerlifting.  But during that period—probably 1962 or so—I got a call from one of the football coaches asking me if I’d mind taking a look at Don Talbert, an All-Southwest Conference defensive tackle, who was getting ready to turn pro and wanted to gain some weight.  I knew about Talbert, of course, as he was one of three brothers, all of whom played for Texas and all of whom were tall and rangy—like big, rawboned cowboys. But when Don came in and I tested him on the bench press, I was absolutely astonished to see that he could only do two or three reps with the Olympic bar and a pair of 45s—135 pounds was almost his limit, and the way the bar moved in and out of the groove on the long way to his long arms’ length was proof that he had no experience at all with this most basic of football lifts.  (Later that day Tolbert deadlifted 405 pounds, which revealed the sort of good basic strength often seen among working men and non-weight trained athletes.)

Don Talbert

But once Coach made the move to a more modern approach to training football players the Longhorns solidified their status as a perennial power, winning three national team titles during the 1960s.  During that period Charlie Craven, a young faculty member who to this day helps with the rehabilitation of injured UT players, had a central role as he gradually introduced heavier weights into the program.  Finally, in 1978—shortly after Coach Royal had stepped down as Head Coach and become the Director of Intercollegiate Athletics—UT hired their first full time “Strength Coach,” Dana LaDuc.  A former Longhorn field event specialist, LaDuc, who had won the national collegiate championship in the shot put in 1976, began to oversee the weight program for football with the full support of Coach Royal, who spent most of his career as a skeptic of heavy weights for athletes before he realized that, in football, “heavy” was the light at the end of the tunnel.

As for Frank Medina, I interviewed him in 1984 about how things had changed since the days when I’d lettered at UT and he’d been in charge of all of the training done by the Longhorn players.  When I visited him at his home that day, Medina had been retired for seven years, but I found him to be an unhappy and–where training theory was concerned–unreconstructed man.  As we talked about the sea-changes which had taken place during his 32 years as the Head Trainer, I asked him what he thought of the about face.  “We never used weights in my early days here,” Medina recalled, “…and I didn’t believe in it…I still don’t believe in all that heavy stuff.  I always said that if God wanted a boy to be bulgy He’d have made him bulgy.”

Having grown fairly bulgy myself by 1964, I left UT in the fall of that year to become managing editor of Strength & Health magazine.  I didn’t return for any length of time until 1983, when my wife, Jan, and I came back to UT and began to teach and build our library.  Before I joined the faculty, I was teaching at Auburn University in Alabama and writing occasional articles for Sports Illustrated on subjects relating to strength.  One of the articles—“Still Going Strong,” published in November of 1970–was a profile of the All-Pro lineman Robert “Bob” Young, who was then starring for the Houston Oilers under Coach Bum Phillips.  By that time Young, at the age of 38, was the oldest offensive guard in the National Football League and, two years earlier, had become the oldest man in NFL history selected to play in his first Pro Bowl.  (This transformation occurred after Young had spent over a decade as a journeyman guard in the NFL without the benefit of any weight training at all even as it had begun to be used by almost all the down lineman in the league.  Finally–spurred to train by the world powerlifting titles being won by his younger, smaller brother Doug—Bob began to work heavy in earnest, and the training plus his freakish natural strength quickly transformed him into the strongest man in football as well as into what Jim Hanifan, his line coach in St. Louis, said was the best offensive lineman in the NFL.) In an odd but interesting way, Young’s college career had touched both my own career as well as that of Coach Royal and, as I was gathering information for the article, I wanted to interview Coach—who years before had won the recruiting war for Young–about his recollection of those long gone days.

Charlie Craven

When I called to explain my assignment from Sports Illustrated, Coach said he’d be happy to speak to me about “Robert,” adding that his memories were bittersweet.  By then Royal had retired as the Texas coach, but he retained an almost mystical reputation on campus because of his remarkable successes as well as his character as a man—a reputation he retained throughout his life and which continues now that he’s gone.  When I sat down with him in his office, we exchanged recollections of those early days before the coming of weight training and of how profoundly they had changed the game itself as well as the size and strength of the men who played it.

But when the talk turned to Young, Coach said, “We’ve had a lot of young men here since I came, and I’ve seen some phenomenal athletes, but the only one either here or anywhere else I know of who had the same sort of God-given raw talent for the game of football was Earl Campbell.  Robert and Earl had it all—strength, speed, quickness, size, balance, coordination, and an almost instinctive insight into the nature of the game.  When we could motivate him I saw Robert do things I never thought I’d see a 17-year-old boy do.  None of our varsity players was a match for him one-on-one.  He was voted the outstanding freshman lineman in the Southwest Conference, but even then he never played up to his potential.  Had he stayed eligible here and gotten serious, there’s little doubt in my mind he’d have been at least a two-time All-American, an Outland Trophy winner, and a million or two dollars richer than he is now.  One of the things I’m sorriest about is that we couldn’t manage to keep Robert eligible.”

I told Coach that I suffered some similar frustration myself back then after a weight training friend of mine from Robert’s hometown of Brownwood begged me to come with him to a local gym and watch Robert being tested on the lift my friend revered over all others—the Push Press.  I finally agreed to come but I told my friend that if he wanted to really test the basic strength of a teenager who had never trained with weights it would be wiser to test him on the Deadlift, which didn’t require the timing, coordination, and “knack” of a lift like the Push Press.  However, my friend wouldn’t be swayed and so we tested Robert’s Push Press –“Not the Push Jerk, by God, the Push PRESS!  No bending of the knees after driving the bar off the shoulders!”

Anyway, when we got to the gym and I met Robert, my conviction grew that he had no chance at all to Push Press a heavy weight because his shoulders and upper arms showed no evidence at all of any weight training.  He was, however, very thick from his chest down to his thighs—rotund and portly, like a young, well-fed bear.  However, as I watched my friend show Robert how to do a “correct Push Press,” and watched Robert began to lift I went from being impressed to being shocked to being absolutely flabbergasted as the bar went up and up and up again—from 135 pounds in fairly small jumps all the way to 300 pounds.  Three Hundred Pounds!  I have little doubt that many seasoned lifters—especially weightlifters–will be convinced when they read the figures I’ve just written that after all these years I’ve simply forgotten.  And some will think I’m trying to add to the Young Legend, since we became close friends later in life.  But I saw him do it, and I’ll never forget it.

Robert “Bob” Young

I should add that there was no “pressing” at all in Robert’s Push Presses.  He simply took the bar off of a squat rack, stepped back, bent his knees and then drove the bar overhead so fast that it never slowed down until it was locked out overhead.  Perhaps more amazing, Robert never lost his balance.  Later, as I thought about what appeared to be a miracle, I realized that Robert had such prodigious explosive power in his legs, hips, and body that they drove the bar over his head and such precise coordination that he could balance and control his body like a seasoned lifter.  After having seen what he could do, I did everything I could to convince him to begin heavy training.  I even promised I’d pick him up at his dorm, take him to the weight room, and take him back again.  But although he went with me a couple of times he was just too interested in sleeping late, eating huge meals, and leaving his dorm in the early evening focused on fun.  But both Coach and I knew a puredee phenomenon when we saw one.

The next direct interaction I had with Coach happened in 1984, soon after I joined the UT faculty and began to pay my respects to some of the people who had been here back when I left.  The main reason I wanted to talk to Coach was that I already had hopes of creating a place on campus where artifacts of all sorts related to the rich history of Varsity Athletics at UT, particularly football, could be showcased.  As a letterman myself I’d always believed that it would be a smart play for UT to build a museum in which it could pay its respects to the hundreds, even thousands, of young men and young women who had put so much sweat equity into the building of the Longhorn brand.  (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that another one of my reasons for suggesting such a museum to Coach was that I thought it might also be a place where Jan and I could house our growing physical culture collection and share it with others.)

In any case, once I sat down to make my pitch to Coach for such a facility I soon reached the point at which I asked him if he had any items such as letters, photos, and tapes that he might be willing to contribute.  At that moment his face clouded over and he began to shake his head.  “I’m ashamed to tell you what I have to tell you,” he said, “but back when the time came that I stepped down as the Athletic Director I wanted to clear my office out as soon as I could.  So one day I asked my assistant to bring in some big trash cans.”  Trash cans.  Those words chilled me, and I knew more bad news was coming.  Sure enough, Coach went on to describe how he began to pull out the drawers of his long bank of filing cabinets and dump the contents into the trash cans.  “I still can’t believe I threw all those letters away,” he said.  “Most of them were from a long time ago and lots of them were from players and coaches.  By then I had thousands of letters, and many’s the day when I’ve wished I still had them.”

Even so–in the strange way life has of sometimes reaching back, taking hold of a woof out of the past and pulling it through the warp of the here and now so that a solid fabric is made whole again–we were contacted early last year by Jenna McEachren, a gifted writer and good friend of the Royal family.  Jenna—who had by then just finished a manuscript of a recently-published book about Coach—explained to us that Edith Royal, Coach’s wife of over 60 years, had a large number of personal photo albums she’d accumulated over the years and that she and Coach might be willing to donate them to the archives of the Stark Center.  We of course told Jenna we’d be delighted to see, care for, and display the albums, and we invited her to bring Mrs. Royal to visit the center.  That visit began a series of meetings and discussions which led in time to the gift last summer of 29 large photo albums covering the major aspects of the amazing life she and Coach had together.  During one of our early meetings I told Mrs. Royal about the meeting I had with Coach in 1984 when he revealed that he’d disposed of his vast collection of correspondence, and that he’d regretted it ever since.  “Well,” Mrs. Royal said, smiling, “that was a shame, but thank goodness I’ve always been a saver.”

Here’s how I see this story.  Edith understood that even after the passing of the three decades since he emptied his filing cabinets—and even with the late onset of Alzheimer’s disease–Coach would be pleased to know that some of the countless photos taken of him, his friends, and his family would wind up in a facility dedicated to sports and fitness.  However that might be, last summer Jan and I drove to the Royal’s beautiful condo overlooking the Hill Country, boxed up those 29 albums, carried them back to UT, and put them in a safe, secure, and climate-controlled part of the Stark Center where they’ll remain until later this year when we mount a photo exhibit featuring this wise, charismatic man who during the 20 years he coached football here had the best record of any man in the country; the respect of US Presidents; and the friendship and love of rowdy, whisky-drinking singers and and songwriters like Willie and Waylon and Jerry Jeff—artists who paid that love forward by sharing the stage with and befriending the long-haired, dope-smoking , creative harbingers of a changing world and, in the process, laying the groundwork for what’s now known from Belgrade to Borneo as the live music capitol of the world.

The foundation of Coach’s fame flowed from his dominance in one of the most violent of sports, but early on he understood that everybody deserves to be treated with respect and that we’d all be better off if we’d just let one another be.  One of the many things which speak to Coach’s character is his often-repeated admission that he should have integrated his football team sooner than he did.  No one forced him to admit it.  But he owned up to it even so, just as he admitted to me a half century ago that when he watched Billy Cannon light the grass on fire he knew that what his coaches had taught him and what he’d taught the players about lifting heavy weights was dead wrong.  I felt honored that Coach called me in for a talk that day and I felt honored to share the truth my body told me.  Now that he’s gone on ahead—and thanks to Edith Royal’s saving grace–I’m honored to have such a rich photographic record of their life together and honored to have it here, in a stadium which bears his name.

In early September 2012, Dr. Paul Dimeo, arrived at the Stark Center on the University of Texas campus.  Dimeo, a professor and sport historian from the University of Stirling in Stirling, Scotland, has been visiting UT as a Fulbright Scholar, and he has been using the archives available at the Stark Center and surrounding areas.

“I wanted to come [to Texas] specifically because I had already been working with Dr. Hunt…It’s also the kind of information and archives that are available here [at the Stark Center],” said Dimeo.  ”It’s probably the best anywhere for what I’m interested in doing.”

Dimeo began the application process for the Fulbright Scholar over 18 months ago.  The scholarship has funded his research project entitled, ‘The Doping of Elite Athletes in International Sport and the Politics of the Cold War, 1950-1990’, which he has been working on during his three-month Fulbright term at the University of Texas at Austin.  So far, with the assistance of Dr. Thomas Hunt, Dr. Matthew Bowers and Ph.D. student Scott Jedlicka, Dr. Dimeo has produced two articles in relation to his research topic, which have been submitted to various academic journals.

“Paul is one of the world’s leading experts on the culture and politics of doping,” said Hunt.  “It was a natural fit for him to come here…We have a unique archive access here on campus to the former East German documents.  We gained some new political insights about the Stasi doping system in East Germany.”

Dimeo says that if he had not been named a Fulbright Scholar, his research project would have to have been postponed.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do the more historical research on the Cold War, East Germany and what was happening at the same time in North America without coming to the Stark Center,” said Dimeo.  “It’s a really unique place, and if I hadn’t won Fulbright I would have been doing some other projects.  I really needed a stretch of time here, just to get to know what was in the archives and what else was available.”

Dimeo will be sharing his findings, as well as his entire Fulbright experience, during a special presentation at the Stark Center on December 7 at 2:00 p.m.  The lecture is open to the public, but if you are interested, please contact the Stark Center at (512) 471-4890 to reserve a seat.

As part of the campus-wide celebration, “The Naismith Rules of Basket Ball”, Bradley spoke at the November 29th Basketball and American Culture: A Special Symposium, presented by the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center.  Bradley, who was educated at Princeton, was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, in addition to his storied basketball career including a 1964 Olympic Gold Medal and two NBA championships with the New York Knicks, spoke about the values of the game of basketball and how it affected him personally.

The event featured additional speakers Dr. Dan Nathan, Dr. Reuben A. Buford May and Professor Madeleine Blais, who each have an impressive background in sport history and have produced celebrated works in the field.

Notable attendees include Edith Royal, Jody Conradt, Suzanne Booth, Karen Aston, Ross Ohlendorf, and Mark Henry.

Naismith’s “Original Rules of Basket Ball” will be on display at the Blanton Museaum of Art until January 13, 2013.

To read more about the event, click here.

Senator Bradley and Terry Todd listen to Ross Ohlendorf	Senator Bradley with Suzanne Booth and Ross Ohlendorf	The Longhorn Network was on site for the event

Jody Conradt introduces Senator Bill Bradley	Senator Bill Bradley addresses the crowd	The Alumni Center Ballroom was full for the event

Terry Todd, Reuben May, Suzanne Booth, Bill Bradley, Madeleine Blais, Dan Nathan, Jan Todd, Jody Conradt	Mark Henry, Bill Bradley and Jody Conradt	Bill Bradley with Karen Aston

Bill Bradley with Edith Royal	Dr. Dan Nathan addresses the audience	Dr. Reuben A. Buford May talks about his book

Professor Madeleine Blais	Dr. May answers an audience member’s question

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/fitcity/entries/2012/11/27/basketball_great_bill_bradley.html/?cxntfid=blogs_fit_city

On Saturday, October 27th, more than 40 Olympians who represented the United States in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, along with spouses, friends and family members, arrived in Austin for a special reunion weekend.

The reunion was organized by the Stark Center’s Dr. Thomas Hunt, the 1968 US Olympic Team’s reunion coordinator, Tom Lough (1968 Modern Pentathlon) with assistance from Desiree Harguess, and Cindy Slater.   It was a two day affair and included an extensive program at the Stark Center on Saturday followed by a BBQ lunch.

The highlight of the presentation to the Olympians on Saturday was the discussion by Dr. Hunt of the 1968 Olympic Team Oral History Project on which Dr. Hunt and a group of graduate students have been working  for the past several years.  Dr. Hunt and his students have now interviewed more than 70 Olympians, and their interviews are gradually being added to the on-line didgital archives of the Stark Center.  To learn more about the 1968 Oral History project, click here.

1968 Olympians, friends and family gather at the Stark Center on Saturday, October 27th, 2012

Madeline Manning Mims, who won gold in track and field (800m) at the 1968 Olympic Games, enjoys refreshments before the program begins.

Dr. Thomas Hunt addresses the crowd on Saturday.

Lance Wyman, the graphic designer of the logos for the 1968 Olympic Games, addresses the crowd on Saturday, October 27th, 2012

There was a great turnout for the 1968 U.S. Olympic Team Reunion

Gary Hall, silver medalist in swimming (400IM) at the 1968 Olympic Games, speaks at the Stark Center on Saturday, October 27th, 2012.

The words “electronic” and “archive” might seem strange in apposition, but they fit. We plan to have this new system house the bulk of our new born digital and newly digitized materials. In addition, it will serve more and more as the central store for many of our available, but variously located, ebooks and other e-materials. In this way, the Stark E-Archive will simplify and ease access to our electronic materials. The miracles of the digital age made manifest at the Stark!

More than a Web portal to our archives, the Stark E-Archive is an archive itself. With the World Wide Web, the definitions of and roles for archives have enlarged. No longer are they solely physical places. The Stark E-Archive reflects traditional archival roles of stewardship, of curation, of preservation,  while incorporating the excitement of the Web, of instantaneous and always available access. This is why the E-Archive is more than just a Web ready consolidation of previously and newly available Stark Center material–it is a radical step forward in how we manage our electronic materials in the charge of serving our users.

What we find particularly interesting about the Stark E-Archive is that it is a near raw space. As a counterpart and extension of our physical archival, it functions as a resource for creators and seekers. Unlike the items in the stacks, however, the E-Archive materials are constantly in public view from moment one. In the Stark Center’s capacities as a library and museum, we marvel at the tremendous efforts of librarians, archivists, scholars, and otherwise, to process and exhibit the materials in our archive. These context building and descriptive activities surrounding objects of historical importance are essential to our mission. But these activities come at the cost of access, time and space constraints. And for every featured exhibit, there are countless items wanting the same treatment. The Stark E-Archive permits a transparent environment where many physical culture objects may be accessed and used throughout the various stages of processing and context building.

The Stark Digital Archive is available at archives.starkcenter.org or by selecting “Stark Digital Archive” from the Stark Center’s main navigation menu. The Stark E-Archive is powered by Dspace. If you have any questions, technical or otherwise, or comments, please contact the Digital Archivist: darchivist@starkcenter.com.

An important aspect of John’s growing affection for the history of physical culture and the “strength sports” is that it grew organically out of his personal participation in those activities. As of 2012 he has more than 50 years of experience in the iron game. John began to compete in both weightlifting and powerlifting way back in the mid-1960s, and by now he’s taken part in 75 contests in those two sports. He has also been active as an official, serving in the past as a member of the National Weightlifting Committee, as Chairman of the Southern Region Powerlifting Committee, as a National Weightlifting Referee, as a Judge at the 1973 Mr. America Contest, and as a Judge at the 1973 Senior National Powerlifting Championships. Over the years, John has officiated in over 50 regional and national meets in Weightlifting, Powerlifting, and Bodybuilding.

John has also taught courses in weight training at the university level, and served as the coach and faculty sponsor of competitive lifting teams at several universities. I should add that John and his able wife Sarah have been invaluable members of the Arnold Strongman Classic team of officials from our very first contest in Columbus, Ohio in 2002. Without question, his many decades of weight training, competing in lifting events, officiating in all three of the major strength sports as well as in Strongman contests has infused his historiography with a depth of understanding that, quite simply, is not available to those who approach a field of human activity as a kind of tourist or, at best, a temporary resident.

In any case, what has come to pass is that Professor Fair — whose main training, teaching, and writing over his 45-year career as an academic has been in British History — has retired from his faculty position at Georgia College and State University so that he could focus all of his professional time and energy on what has become over time his passion: the field of physical culture. In pursuit of that goal John has agreed to serve as an adjunct faculty member here at the Stark Center, where he will spend at least six months of every year advising graduate students, helping us with Iron Game History, and working to develop physical culture research projects in which we all have an interest.

As can be imagined, the banquet-sized table in the Stark Center break-room/kitchen has seen many animated discussions/debates over the past weeks with John and David engaging in free-flowing conversations with our own Dr. Kim Beckwith, Jan Todd, and me — along with our archivist Geoff Schmalz, our head librarian Cindy Slater, our Ph.D. students such as Dominic Morais, Jason Shurley, Desiree Harguess, and Scott Jedlicka as well as a constant flow of visiting scholars who come for a few days or a few weeks to do research in our archives. To me, those lunch-time dialogues are often the most fulfilling part of my days at the Center. To me, they represent what, at its best, a university can and should be. This is what Jan and I hoped might happen once the Stark Center got up and running and now—with the help of people like John and David, plus our genuinely exceptional graduate students — we can see it and, what’s even better, be part of it.

And speaking of graduate students now might be a good time to say how proud we are about Dominic Morais, one of Jan’s PhD students. Dominic did his undergraduate work and played a little football at Vanderbilt and, in the process, built an outstanding academic record before being accepted into our interdisciplinary doctoral program. What’s more, he’s one of about 30 of UT’s “Presidential Fellows,” which means that he was awarded a scholarship worth about $35,000 per year. Nor has Dominic rested on his laurels. In fact, he got word just last week that his research paper, “Branding Iron: An Examination of Eugen Sandow’s Utilization of ‘Modern’ Marketing,” had been selected as the best graduate student paper of 2012 by the North American Society for Sport History. This is a significant honor and means that: 1) his way to the annual NASSH Conference will be paid, 2) his paper will be delivered in front of the entire membership, and 3) a longer version of the paper will then be published in the NASSH journal. (Dominic plans to write his dissertation on one aspect or another of resistance exercise.)

As for how the daily presence of David Webster and John Fair here at the Stark Center can matter to the development of a graduate student, consider what Dominic said one day to Jan when she asked him why he almost always had his lunch when David and John were having theirs and why he always seemed ready to join in if a group of old timers like David and John and Kim and the two of us decided to go to a nearby café for dinner. “All I can say,” Dominic responded, “is that every time I’ve spent time with people who’ve been students of the game for a long time I’ve always learned something. I feel lucky to be here.”

I should also mention that Jason Shurley — another outstanding doctoral student – recently co-authored with Jan and Terry Todd a long article about the remarkable career of Dr. Thomas DeLorme, the orthopedic surgeon who first came up with the term “Progressive Resistance Exercise.” (The article has been accepted for publication in the July issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.) And there’s more: Desiree Harguess, a PhD student working under the direction of the Stark Center’s Dr. Tommy Hunt, was the co-author with Jan Todd of “Doris Barrilleaux and the Beginnings of Modern Women’s Bodybuilding”, which was published in the last issue of Iron Game History.

We’ve also had a steady stream of researchers from other cities, states, and even countries who have come to use the library at the Stark Center and to dig into projects dealing with one aspect of physical culture or another; but I’ll save the details about those people and their projects for a later posting in “Don’t Weaken.”

Bill Kazmaier is interviewed by Robb Weller as he stands in front of the gigantic photo of himself in the Weider Museum

Over the past year or so, we’ve had a number of meetings with the leadership of MUSL, including Jacob Arback, the CEO, and Robb Weller, the Executive Vice President for Programing and Production. We’ve been very impressed by their track record—as has the brain trust from the Arnold Sports Festival–and so when MUSL expressed an interest in attending the Weider Museum opening we enthusiastically invited them to come and also to tape the evening for posterity. They did this by hiring a local crew and, under Weller’s direction, by interviewing the guests, taping the speeches, and in general capturing the spirit and feel of the occasion. Robb has had a long television career as an executive as well as behind the mic, and he handled the interviews.

Down the road, once MUSL is on the air 24-7—which should happen sometime next year—several uses will probably be made of the evening’s taping, but in the meantime we decided to ask Eric Williams, an Austin-based producer and film editor who worked for MUSL that night, to edit the raw footage into a documentary of between 20 and 25 minutes. We believe the resulting documentary will go a long way toward helping people to better understand how the 225 or so guests we had that night reacted to what they saw at the Stark Center and inside the Weider Museum. The video has been embedded at the bottom of this post.

From what can be gathered from the documentary, it seems to have been the case that our guests—a great majority of whom had never visited the facility before—were surprised at the scope of the Stark Center and by the size and richness of the Weider Museum and the photographic exhibition that was on display. The interviews make this plain and also emphasize how pleased the guests were to fully understand that the field in which they carved out a prominent place for themselves had given birth to a place at which serious students of the iron game and health promotion could study—a place where the “papers” and photos and artifacts of the major players in the field could be collected and saved for future generations. That this reaction was genuine can be seen from the fact that quite a number of our guests have either sent artifacts from their personal collections or sent checks to help us with our significant and ongoing operating expenses.

It was also apparent that our visitors felt an overwhelming gratitude to Joe and Betty Weider for becoming the first significant financial backers of our effort to create a combined research library and museum in a public facility. Well before there was a Stark Center, Joe directed the Weider Foundation to provide a million dollars toward this effort. I made it clear in my remarks that night and in things I’ve written that had Joe not done what he did in 2004 the University may never have given us an opportunity to raise the five and a half million more it took to build out the bare shell we were given.

But the gratitude our guests felt for Joe and Betty went far, far beyond the Weiders’ contributions to the Stark Center and the Weider Museum as significant as those were ($2,000,000 as well as almost all of their iron game art). The guests’ gratitude was primarily based on the decades during which Joe and Betty and Ben Weider led the fight to bring the field of resistance training out of the relative handful of the usually dark and primitive gyms of the past and into the health clubs, the hospitals, the public schools, the colleges, the retirement homes, and the armed forces of the world we have today. Many of the guests we had in Austin that night were among the game’s most prominent people—lifters, bodybuilders, strongmen, administrators, coaches, and manufacturers—and they know how long and hard Joe worked to bring physical culture into the beating heart of popular culture. These people watched him do it and helped him do it. And it was that experience and that knowledge which led to the outpouring of gratitude that flowed over this patriarch who sat smiling quietly as the guests crowded around him to shake his hand and to tell him how much he had meant to them and to the game which has made us all.