H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports

Burnt orange rectangle with greek antiquity style border and white text that reads,

A blue-tinted image of a middle-aged man jogging on a treadmill while a performance scientist takes data on a computer.

2026 Conference

A black and white photo of a football game between texas and texas a&m, pete layden carries the ball for texas with a white jersey. From 1940.

A burnt orange rectangle with white text that reads,

A color photo of Dr. Kim Beckwith in the Stark Center reading room. She wears her Hall of Honor medal around her neck.

A black and white photograph of University of Texas Longhorn women's basketball coach, Jody Conradt. Conradt stands center holding a microphone with her players in a row behind her, many photographers and camera operators record what she is saying.

Burnt Orange rectangle with white text which reads,

A two-page black and white spread of a strength training booklet with a photo and instructions on how to perform a two hand press.

Blue rectangle with white text that reads,

A photograph of a scattered work space with laptop, notebook, book, pens, ruler, coffe mug, and on top of it all is an open copy of Men's Health magazine.

OPEN HOURS

Weekdays: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.

Weekends & Holidays: Closed

CHECK OUT THESE COLLECTIONS & EXHIBITS

Within the white outline of a rectangle with rounded corners, text reads,

Doctors Curtis Jackson (Shorty) & Mary Evelyn Boice
Alderson Collection Muscle Beach Health and Life Magazine

Collections

Digital Library

Galleries

Welcome to the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports.

The Stark Center is a research center housed within the Department of Kinesiology & Health Education. We are a unique combination of library, archive, and gallery/exhibit space.

It's a Good LifeBy Jan Todd

6 2

An Unexpected Pleasure: Kissing the Ground in Equilibrium—A Search for the Origins of the Pushup

One of the things I enjoy most about the Stark Center are the requests we often get for information about some aspect of the history of physical culture. Most of those requests are handled by our incredible Stark Center staff but every now and then a request will make its way to my inbox and I find myself so intrigued that I end up doing research that wasn’t planned because the question made me curious too. This past Sunday was one of those days. I got an unexpected email from Denis Blinov, whom I’ve never met. “May I ask if you...

Cover of the 1945 UT vs. Rice football game with colorful scene of two players in orange on the ground with a player in blue falling on them an a ball being carried in the foreground.

Horns and Heroes, News, Blogs & Updates, UncategorizedBy Patty McCain

0 0

When Football Programs Were Works of Art

If you attend a Texas Longhorn football game today, you’ll be handed a program that has been mass produced for at least 100,000 fans. Not to knock any of the exceptional photography that has been used in the modern era of college football on the program covers, but they typically use one photo for the entire season and just change out the guts of the program to include the visiting team’s lineup and college information. Gameday programs were not always this standardized. In fact, they were once vibrant works of art. Few cover artists shaped that era more profoundly than...

Iron Game History

Browse the Complete Journal Archive

The Stark Center features collections from around the world related to all aspects of physical culture and sports.

The University of Texas at Austin seal link to UTexas home

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.

Necessary

Always Enabled

Analytics

Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.

Cookie	Duration	Description
_ga	2 years	The _ga cookie, installed by Google Analytics, calculates visitor, session and campaign data and also keeps track of site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognize unique visitors.
_gat_gtag_UA_157682467_1	1 minute	Set by Google to distinguish users.
_gid	1 day	Installed by Google Analytics, _gid cookie stores information on how visitors use a website, while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the data that are collected include the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously.
CONSENT	2 years	YouTube sets this cookie via embedded youtube-videos and registers anonymous statistical data.

Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.

Cookie	Duration	Description
NID	6 months	NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads.
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	5 months 27 days	A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface.
YSC	session	YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages.
yt-remote-connected-devices	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video.
yt-remote-device-id	never	YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video.