The Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports was founded in 2009 and seeks to preserve and share materials related to the history of sports, physical culture and other aspects of sports humanities. The center contains public galleries with museum and art displays, a large research and study area, and an enormous library and archive that include decades of UT sports history materials, alternative medical materials, most of the health and fitness magazines ever published in English, more than 50,000 books, thousands of rare photos, and the private papers of many important figures in sports, the history of exercise and the history of physical culture.
Co-founder Terry Todd attended UT in the 1950s on a tennis scholarship. He began to lift weights, something that was not typically done at the time.
“Weightlifting was like counterculture,” Stark Center curator Kyle Martin says. “The idea of using it to become a better athlete was basically taboo. Coaches thought it would make you ‘musclebound,’ but Terry showed both as an athlete and as an academic that that was not true.”
Todd went on to become a national champion in powerlifting, setting a number of records. He then pursued a Ph.D. focused on the history of strength training. It was during this work that the idea for the Stark Center was born. According to Stark Center director Jan Todd, it was her husband’s search for primary sources that led him to the idea of creating an archive dedicated to the history of exercise and sport.
The Todds were the muscle behind opening the center, whether moving boxes of materials or providing funding for acquisitions. Their biggest lift, however, has been raising money to build and keep the center open. The center relies on private gifts to support staff salaries and new exhibits and to pay for the conservation of books, artifacts and personal papers. Jan Todd set up an estate plan in support of the Stark Center with UT after the passing of her husband in 2018.
“It’s what we always said we would do with our estate, and it makes me happy to think that our gift will help the center continue to become even more central to the study of the history of sport and physical culture around the world,” she says.
Martin says scholars come from all over the world to do research at the Stark Center. The archives also contain an endless collection of sports ephemera — everything from scrapbooks on Coach Royal to custom-made arm wrestling shoes, Clyde Littlefield’s trophies, Jodie Conradt’s memorabilia, weightlifting posters and Texas sports memorabilia, along with many other one-of-a-kind pieces.
“You really need to visit the center to understand how amazing it is and how we both educate and preserve this history. There is really nothing else like it,” Martin says. “And there’s so much more we still need and want to do.”
The center’s public galleries feature various museum and art displays.
The archive includes thousands of rare photos.
The center collects English-language health and fitness magazines.
