TheRecat the Universityof Portland

A Vote for What Can BeYes, 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, rever-ence and witness. It’s about realizing that the body is a holyand astounding vehicle for the jazz of your spirit. It’s aboutcompeting, razzing, laughing, sprinting, meditating. In a realsense it’s about confidence, respect, attentiveness. In a realsense it’s a huge classroom. It’s about health and wisdom. It’sabout students reaching for not only their best intellectualand spiritual selves but their best physical selves. It’s aboutthe extraordinary music of the body sailing through the holy airof this world. It’s so obviously and joyously about our studentsthat the students themselves have donated $70,000 toward it, whichis a remarkable and thrilling sentence.

And it is about you who hold this little bright booklet inyour hands. Any and all gifts toward The Rec are votes of con-fidence, votes for what can be, votes for students rising everhigher toward their wildest holiest selves. For whatever you cando—thanks.

Brian Doylebdoyle@up.edu

FluidityYoga is the capital city of an ancient civilization inside yourbody to be discovered by the spoon-sized excavation of thebreath. Dig down. Find gold. Inhale and listen. An ancientnamed Patanjali addresses you in Sanskrit as the practice be-gins, with one of 196 zingers called a Yoga Sutra, a thread ofthought from 300 B.C., a stitch of wisdom: Practice kindness to-ward the joyful, affection toward the sufferers, joy toward thepure, and suspended judgment toward the impure. You listen asyour teacher reads, then follow as you enter the intentionalswoon of each pose, tasting where inhalation turns to exhala-tion, as you step higher into your long-hidden realm of deepattention, or deeper down into utter surrender and rest. Bymoving through a series of sweet contortions with names likecobbler, bridge, dolphin, tree, mountain, corpse, and down-ward-facing-dog, you recover the understanding that you are abody, after all. Breath is food, and growing taller is wine, asyou are suspended in bridge pose somewhere far above theturmoil of the modern, somewhere apart from the urgencythat 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 bur-row into the chosen stretch, the discovered treasure, the pre-cious jewel of who you really are. You are dolphin, cobbler,tree. Open your eyes, your teacher says. And there – there isyour new life, stepping forward younger, older, calmer, settledin the tasks that are yours to do. Later, twisting in your seat toback out the car, fluid in your pleasure, you are in a pose thatneeds a new name.

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RunningAt a certain point, you become your breath. Your legs turn overunbidden. The pace is crisp and effortless. The air parts foryou. You are all breath, quicksilver and light. You flicker overthe earth. You run through yourself and out the other side.You encounter no resistance. Somewhere inside you is a metro-nome and the running strikes it. You thrum and hum withthat interior rhythm. You could cover the next lap, the nextmile, with your eyes closed. All the familiar complaints aboutthis thing you do – the boredom, the discomfort, the monotony– fall away as you settle deeper into the discovered continentof your own body. And there is an atavism to this, a connec-tion to something buried in your bones. Something wired intowho you are as a human being. A sense that no matter whatelse your form was made for, it was made for this: runningsmoothly toward the yawning horizon. And so eventually youare whittled down to breath alone. The act of running becomesan act of mending. You sew the landscape together by travelingover it. You hem your stride to efficiency. You bind lungs tolegs. You stitch your mind, so frequently unhinged these days,to the vacant, waiting threadholes of your heart.

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HoopsIt’s a fast quicksilvery generous liquid flowing zesty vivaciouscreative selfless sprinting flying floating braided game, bas-ketball – a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a many-headed creature alert and attentive and attuned to the mostexquisite ephemeral geometry, when it’s played well; and itcan be played well by grinning children as well as grim pro-fessionals. It is not about the delivery of violence, like footballand rugby. It is not frozen and toothless and armored, likehockey. It is never scoreless, as even terrific soccer can be. Itis never slow, like baseball and cricket often are. It does notreward selfishness, as solo sports like running and swimmingand tennis do. It depends on vision and camaraderie and gen-erosity of spirit. The point is to share. A lesser generous teamcan easily beat a better greedier team. It is the game with themost joy in it, with plenty of points and no pads and glovesand helmets and tools and war language. It is the game clos-est to jazz. It was invented in America, on a winter day, by adoctor who had been orphaned as a child. It has been playedon The Bluff from the University’s first winters, a centuryago, the boys practicing on the dirt floor of the University’scavernous track Colosseum. It is the single most popularteam sports among the University’s modern students, by amile. There are twenty pickup games a day in Howard Hallnow, and there are interhall games, and an intramural league,and an outdoor court behind Villa, and an annual spring out-door tournament, and what would it be like to be twentyyears old, a few years from now, and be young and strong andgoofy, and electric with adolescent energy, and be flying tothe basket on the gleaming new courts of the Rec, about toput your team up by a bucket with seconds to play? Wouldn’tthat be wild and sweet?

Brian Doyle

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Missing Howard HallWhen I arrived on The Bluff in 1970, Howard Hall alreadywore the look of times past, and there were welcome rumorsof an imminent retirement even then...and that was fortyyears ago, when old Howard only wore half of its 83 years.Now retired myself, I carry, like so many of you, fond snap-shots in memory of happy times spent within those enduringand often vexing brick walls.

Senator John F. Kennedy addressing a crowd from the stageat the end of the basketball court in those innocent dayswhen he invited the world to share his dreams, unaware ofthe nightmare that would accompany them.

I wish I had been in the bleachers when the great ElginBaylor, who wanted to enroll at the University of Portland butwas not accepted, played his first game for Seattle Universityagainst the Pilots in Howard Hall, punctuating his displeasureand disappointment with forty points.

It would have been fun to watch Michael Jordan filmed ina Nike ad that used Howard as the quintessential ancient gymwhere the game itself might have been born; as it was fun towatch Wilt Chamberlain and his Lakers practice there, andthe Trailblazers.

Before the Chiles (B.C.), Howard was the Pilots’ homecourt. Two snapshots: one year when the female cheerleaderswere suspended, a fraternity filled the gap dressed in floppywhite caps and oversized white painters’ pants...

1950

Missing Howard Hall...Their standard half-time event was bringing out a coffin tohalf-court, from which emerged an honored guest – the uni-versity’s president or a favorite teacher, one never knew. Sec-ond snapshot: a game against the University of Hawaii, whenthe upper deck of Howard Hall – a precarious piece of engi-neering – was filled with massively muscled Hawaiian men inbrightly flowered shirts that created the illusion of a rain for-est near the ceiling. We lost the game, and eventually theupper deck was closed by the city fire marshal.

Howard Hall was and is a genuine university communitycenter – most treasured to me being the noon league that ranfor twenty years, in which pick-up games included men andwomen, students and faculty, administrators and groundscrew, mechanics and coaches (some of them from the Trail-blazers, for whom Howard was their first practice facility).The same kind of community flourished in the exerciserooms underneath the booming timbers of the basketballcourt.

And now there are serious rumors of a new gym. Thesooner the better! But I would like to think that when we re-place the creaky floors and old bricks of Howard Hall, weallow the best spirits and stories of old Howard Hall a place inthe new rec center.

Lou Masson

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ClimbingWith 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 climbingisn't just a sport; it is a creative way to strengthen the stuff in-side me - the me of me. Every day is challenge and struggle,relationships in motion, the possibility of nasty falls; and climb-ing for me is a way to learn how to recover, how to focus, howto fully engage in life. The rock reflects my best and my worstand makes me deal with it. I don't climb to beat the rock, orbeat the mountain; I climb as a guest, I work with the rock, themountain. Some days I summit, some days I turn around, andboth are fine. The process is the point. The climbing, for me,is about trust, struggle, simplicity, endurance, risk, focus, cre-ativity, patience, respect. In a very real sense I learn from therock, the mountain. In a very real sense it is a spiritual exercise.

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The PitchWe need your help, to make TheRec reality. We need gifts andpledges and donors happily buy-ing basketballs and weights andyoga rooms and track lanes andvolleyball courts and swimminglanes and anything else thatwould hilariously bear your namefor a century. We need friendswho see that The Rec is nutritiousand necessary to the Universitywe wish to be. We need visionar-ies and imagineers. We need –you. Call the Development Officewhen you get a minute? 503.943.7395, or see rise.up.edu. Tell themPortland Magazine sent you.

rise.up.edu

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