David Deming with his bronze sculpture of Terry Todd
October 20, 2021June 14, 2024
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A Surprise Gift from Artist David Deming

For 15 years renowned artist David Deming and I shared The Forty Acres—as we call UT’s main campus—but our paths never crossed. Deming was in the Art Department teaching sculpture, then serving as chair of the department, and finally as Dean of The College of Fine Arts until he moved back to his hometown in 1998 to become President of the Cleveland Institute of Art. During those same years, Terry and I were teaching weight training and other classes in Kinesiology and Health Education.  We were friends with other Art Department faculty like painters Kelly Fearing, and Vincent Mariani, (who...

John Davis, Jim Bradford, Norbert Schemansky, and Paul Anderson of the US Weightlifting Team stand behind a barbell.
July 23, 2021July 23, 2021
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STRONGMAN PROJECT Celebrates the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo by Looking Back at the Golden Age of American Weightlifting

According to weightlifting historian John Fair, the Golden Age of American Weightlifting was defined as the period from 1945 to 1960. It was a time when American athletes regularly populated the podiums of international weightlifting competitions. In fact, counting from the Paris World Championships in 1946 through the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne, the United States weightlifting team won seven of eleven world team titles and more than half of the individual titles. Some of the greatest lifters in history were members of the United States weightlifting teams during this successful run of years. Over on Strongman Project, we have...

Mark Henry
June 18, 2021June 26, 2024
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Celebrate Juneteenth with Mark Henry at The Strongman Project

In celebration of tomorrow’s Juneteenth holiday, I’ve published a new Feature over at The Strongman Project all about the life and strength career of Mark Henry. In a 2009 blog post titled “Broad Shoulders,” Terry Todd explains his detailed method for accurately measuring the width of Mark Henry’s shoulders. In the post’s final sentence, he wrote, “As for Mark, he may not be the broadest, but he’s a real shadow-caster,” a clever and playful description of Mark’s prodigious size. Mark very accurately fits the bill, both in physicality and personality. Mark is one of the Iron Game’s greatest lifters and,...

Tommy Kono competing on stage in Moscow, 1958
May 17, 2021July 17, 2024
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Celebrating AAPI Heritage Month with Tommy Kono

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which provides an opportunity for our nation to pay tribute to the many Asian and Pacific Islanders who enriched America’s history and established its future prosperity. In celebration of AAPI Heritage Month, I highly recommend that everyone check out Indomitable: The Tommy Kono Story, an on-line exhibit produced by The California Museum and currently hosted on Google Arts & Culture. Here is a link to the exhibit. Back in March, Amanda Weyer, who is the exhibitions manager at The California Museum, reached out to us with plans for the exhibit and the hope that...

Scanned Cover of Iron Game History Volume 15 Number 1
May 13, 2021May 20, 2021
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The Terry Todd “Special Issue” of Iron Game History

Since we began Iron Game History in 1990, we’ve dedicated a full issue of Iron Game History to one person as a memorial tribute on several rare occasions. The last person to be so honored, in fact, was Olympic weightlifting gold medalist Tommy Kono whose life is detailed in a special double issue of IGH published in 2017. Last month, however, we mailed out a very different kind of special issue about the life of Terry Todd, who passed away in 2018. Instead of having people write tributes to Terry, I decided to republish pieces written by Terry at various...

Photographs from the Anna Hiss Collection
May 6, 2021May 20, 2021
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Photographs from the Anna Hiss Collection

This week at The Stark Center, I’ve been thinking a lot about the history of women’s fitness and physical activity here on The Forty Acres. On Wednesday night, we were fortunate to host the University’s distinguished Tower Fellows.  After our director, Jan Todd, addressed the visitors and told them about how the Stark Center was founded and what our mission is, she turned the floor over to Tower Fellow Amy Porter, a University of Texas alumnus, highly successful businesswoman, and a former Texas Cheerleader (1990-1994) who spoke movingly about the role of cheerleading in the lives of American women and...

Clyde Littlefield & The Texas Relays
March 27, 2021June 21, 2024
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Clyde Littlefield & The Texas Relays

After last year’s cancellation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Clyde Littlefield Texas Relays are back! This year’s meet is slightly different than usual. It will not include high school teams or individual athletes and it will take place over three days instead of four. The Clyde Littelfield Texas Relays is one of the nation’s premier track & field events. Top-level athletes, their coaches, and track & field fans from all over the Southwest travel to the University of Texas every spring to compete. Last year’s cancellation was the first since 1935, so in celebration of the meet’s return —...

March 19, 2021September 30, 2022
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A New Page for Academic Conferences and Symposiums

As many of you know, The Stark Center hosted a virtual conference on January 15, 2021, called Physical Cultures of the Body. Twenty-one scholars representing thirteen different countries presented papers on the symbolic and cultural importance of the healthy and active body with reference to issues of race, gender, injury, strength, performance, eugenics, and much more. Over one hundred people from around the globe registered for the conference and attended. It was a great success. So successful, in fact, that we have launched a new page on our web site devoted to academic conferences and symposiums. In the ‘Research’ menu...

John Davis on the cover of Ebony Magazine, May 1952
March 1, 2021May 20, 2021
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John Davis on the Cover of Ebony Magazine, May 1952

In honor of Black History Month, I wanted to celebrate by sharing this issue of Ebony Magazine from May 1952. (Unfortunately, I’m late to publish this post due to Winter Storm Uri and the issues it created at The Stark Center. Please forgive my tardiness). In the lead up to the Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland, Ebony published articles previewing the Games and the Black athletes who were set to compete. The 1952 Summer Games were highly anticipated because, for the first time in history, the Soviet Union would send its best athletes to the competition. The Cold War was...