The Rec
at the University of Portland
A Vote for What Can Be
Yes, the University really needs a new student recreation center; blessed old Howard Hall was built before the dinosaurs died. Yes, that’s why it’s such a crucial Campaign target. But no — it’s not just a huge gym. It’s about health and fitness, reverence and witness. It’s about realizing that the body is a holy and astounding vehicle for the jazz of your spirit. It’s about competing, razzing, laughing, sprinting, meditating. In a real sense it’s about confidence, respect, attentiveness. In a real sense it’s a huge classroom. It’s about health and wisdom. It’s about students reaching for not only their best intellectual and spiritual selves but their best physical selves. It’s about the extraordinary music of the body sailing through the holy air of this world. It’s so obviously and joyously about our students that the students themselves have donated $70,000 toward it, which is a remarkable and thrilling sentence. And it is about you who hold this little bright booklet in your hands. Any and all gifts toward The Rec are votes of confidence, votes for what can be, votes for students rising ever higher toward their wildest holiest selves. For whatever you can do — thanks. Brian Doyle bdoyle@up.edu
Fluidity
Lu ca Tet ton i / Co rbis
Yoga is the capital city of an ancient civilization inside your body to be discovered by the spoon-sized excavation of the breath. Dig down. Find gold. Inhale and listen. An ancient named Patanjali addresses you in Sanskrit as the practice begins, with one of 196 zingers called a Yoga Sutra, a thread of thought from 300 B.C., a stitch of wisdom: Practice kindness toward the joyful, affection toward the sufferers, joy toward the pure, and suspended judgment toward the impure. You listen as your teacher reads, then follow as you enter the intentional swoon of each pose, tasting where inhalation turns to exhalation, as you step higher into your long-hidden realm of deep attention, or deeper down into utter surrender and rest. By moving through a series of sweet contortions with names like cobbler, bridge, dolphin, tree, mountain, corpse, and downward-facing-dog, you recover the understanding that you are a body, after all. Breath is food, and growing taller is wine, as you are suspended in bridge pose somewhere far above the turmoil of the modern, somewhere apart from the urgency that had been your life. Yoga is all practice and no performance, says your teacher. Find a place in your body that is tight, dark, forgotten. And so, blind, deaf to all other sensation, you burrow into the chosen stretch, the discovered treasure, the precious jewel of who you really are. You are dolphin, cobbler, tree. Open your eyes, your teacher says. And there – there is your new life, stepping forward younger, older, calmer, settled in the tasks that are yours to do. Later, twisting in your seat to back out the car, fluid in your pleasure, you are in a pose that needs a new name. Kim Stafford
Running
At a certain point, you become your breath. Your legs turn over unbidden. The pace is crisp and effortless. The air parts for you. You are all breath, quicksilver and light. You flicker over the earth. You run through yourself and out the other side. You encounter no resistance. Somewhere inside you is a metronome and the running strikes it. You thrum and hum with that interior rhythm. You could cover the next lap, the next mile, with your eyes closed. All the familiar complaints about this thing you do – the boredom, the discomfort, the monotony – fall away as you settle deeper into the discovered continent of your own body. And there is an atavism to this, a connection to something buried in your bones. Something wired into who you are as a human being. A sense that no matter what else your form was made for, it was made for this: running smoothly toward the yawning horizon. And so eventually you are whittled down to breath alone. The act of running becomes an act of mending. You sew the landscape together by traveling over it. You hem your stride to efficiency. You bind lungs to legs. You stitch your mind, so frequently unhinged these days, to the vacant, waiting threadholes of your heart.
Erik Isa kson / Te tra Ima ges / Co rbis
Dave Devine
Erik Isa kson / Te tra Ima ges / Corb is
It’s a fast quicksilvery generous liquid flowing zesty vivacious creative selfless sprinting flying floating braided game, basketball – a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a manyheaded creature alert and attentive and attuned to the most exquisite ephemeral geometry, when it’s played well; and it can be played well by grinning children as well as grim professionals. It is not about the delivery of violence, like football and rugby. It is not frozen and toothless and armored, like hockey. It is never scoreless, as even terrific soccer can be. It is never slow, like baseball and cricket often are. It does not reward selfishness, as solo sports like running and swimming and tennis do. It depends on vision and camaraderie and generosity of spirit. The point is to share. A lesser generous team can easily beat a better greedier team. It is the game with the most joy in it, with plenty of points and no pads and gloves and helmets and tools and war language. It is the game closest to jazz. It was invented in America, on a winter day, by a doctor who had been orphaned as a child. It has been played on The Bluff from the University’s first winters, a century ago, the boys practicing on the dirt floor of the University’s cavernous track Colosseum. It is the single most popular team sports among the University’s modern students, by a mile. There are twenty pickup games a day in Howard Hall now, and there are interhall games, and an intramural league, and an outdoor court behind Villa, and an annual spring outdoor tournament, and what would it be like to be twenty years old, a few years from now, and be young and strong and goofy, and electric with adolescent energy, and be flying to the basket on the gleaming new courts of the Rec, about to put your team up by a bucket with seconds to play? Wouldn’t that be wild and sweet? Brian Doyle
Da vid Fo ster / Ble nd I mag es / Corbis
Hoops
Missing Howard Hall
When I arrived on The Bluff in 1970, Howard Hall already wore the look of times past, and there were welcome rumors of an imminent retirement even then...and that was forty years ago, when old Howard only wore half of its 83 years. Now retired myself, I carry, like so many of you, fond snapshots in memory of happy times spent within those enduring and often vexing brick walls. Senator John F. Kennedy addressing a crowd from the stage at the end of the basketball court in those innocent days when he invited the world to share his dreams, unaware of the nightmare that would accompany them. I wish I had been in the bleachers when the great Elgin Baylor, who wanted to enroll at the University of Portland but was not accepted, played his first game for Seattle University against the Pilots in Howard Hall, punctuating his displeasure and disappointment with forty points. It would have been fun to watch Michael Jordan filmed in a Nike ad that used Howard as the quintessential ancient gym where the game itself might have been born; as it was fun to watch Wilt Chamberlain and his Lakers practice there, and the Trailblazers. Before the Chiles (B.C.), Howard was the Pilots’ home court. Two snapshots: one year when the female cheerleaders were suspended, a fraternity filled the gap dressed in floppy white caps and oversized white painters’ pants...
1950
Missing Howard Hall ...Their standard half-time event was bringing out a coffin to half-court, from which emerged an honored guest – the university’s president or a favorite teacher, one never knew. Second snapshot: a game against the University of Hawaii, when the upper deck of Howard Hall – a precarious piece of engineering – was filled with massively muscled Hawaiian men in brightly flowered shirts that created the illusion of a rain forest near the ceiling. We lost the game, and eventually the upper deck was closed by the city fire marshal. Howard Hall was and is a genuine university community center – most treasured to me being the noon league that ran for twenty years, in which pick-up games included men and women, students and faculty, administrators and grounds crew, mechanics and coaches (some of them from the Trailblazers, for whom Howard was their first practice facility). The same kind of community flourished in the exercise rooms underneath the booming timbers of the basketball court. And now there are serious rumors of a new gym. The sooner the better! But I would like to think that when we replace the creaky floors and old bricks of Howard Hall, we allow the best spirits and stories of old Howard Hall a place in the new rec center. Lou Masson
19 4 5
196 0
19 6 9
19 9 9
Co msto ck Ima g e s / C o msto ck
Climbing
With climbing, all the different parts of my being come together. My whole mind is taken up by how to place myself in space. Everything must work together, at once, mindfully: strength, balance, tenacity, creativity. My heart races. To me climbing isn't just a sport; it is a creative way to strengthen the stuff inside me - the me of me. Every day is challenge and struggle, relationships in motion, the possibility of nasty falls; and climbing for me is a way to learn how to recover, how to focus, how to fully engage in life. The rock reflects my best and my worst and makes me deal with it. I don't climb to beat the rock, or beat the mountain; I climb as a guest, I work with the rock, the mountain. Some days I summit, some days I turn around, and both are fine. The process is the point. The climbing, for me, is about trust, struggle, simplicity, endurance, risk, focus, creativity, patience, respect. In a very real sense I learn from the rock, the mountain. In a very real sense it is a spiritual exercise.
Ro milly L ockye r / Cu lt ura / G etty
Daniel Boettcher ’12
The Pitch
We need your help, to make The Rec reality. We need gifts and pledges and donors happily buying basketballs and weights and yoga rooms and track lanes and volleyball courts and swimming lanes and anything else that would hilariously bear your name for a century. We need friends who see that The Rec is nutritious and necessary to the University we wish to be. We need visionaries and imagineers. We need – you. Call the Development Office when you get a minute? 503.943. 7395, or see rise.up.edu. Tell them Portland Magazine sent you.
Maximi l i a n o N e i ra / Fl i ckr / Ge tty
rise.up.edu