Wolf Campbell

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The University of New Mexico

English 320-01
M. Kells, Ph.D.
Review 3
17 November 2015

Review: Johnson Gymnasium; A Private Sacred Site

Johnson Gymnasium and I were born in the same year, 1957. It was the main gymnasium
for UNM Sports; mens basketball, mens wrestling, mens gymnastics, and womens and mens
swimming and diving. Womens Sport teams were not properly provided for in those days, but
this has greatly changed for the better. The Gymnasium also provided classrooms and office
space for UNMs well respected Physical Education Department, with a terminal degree of a
Doctorate. Many successful coaches and sports administrators have been trained here. It is
named for Roy Johnson (Old Ironhead), UNMs first-and for more than ten years only coach.
He served as mens basketball, football, baseball, track and tennis coach, as well as athletic
director all while maintaining a full time teaching load. Many of his peers and students spoke of
his unimpeachable integrity and esteemed his high principles and gentlemanly and sportsmanlike

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conduct. The Gymnasium complex is a complete athletic training venue, with an attached
Olympic Pool (Seidler Natatorium), three gyms and all the bells and whistles one might expect.
After the many, many hours I have spent there, I have come to regard it as a temple to physical
culture, to the complete person, of sound mind in sound body, an Ideal of the Classical age.
Often in our culture, Sport is presented as a metaphor for War. As well, the origin of
much of sport has roots in martial training, including the dance. Certainly there is room to
consider such a belief. This is akin to what Lakoff, Johnson call dimension of experience in
direct or indirect understanding. We can consider the objectivist and subjectivist positions of War
and Sport, yet arrive at a third truth, a synthesis of our own experience, as is informed by
metaphor we are not afraid of. Sport is greatly different from war, and physical training is a way
of achieving a unified body, mind and soul, in a holistic integration of its parts. This is worthy of
reverence , as it is a thing we respect that is beyond ourselves, that we know is invested with
virtue , and what is good for us to hope to attain. As well, good health is good for our souls, and
this flows as well from physical culture. Sport is also play, a rite animals engage in to no seeming
purpose. The flow of a game may surprise one with its fluid change of dynamics and poetry of
motion. The perfected movement may achieve the purity of the ballet, inlaid into a playful,
gameful act. This can be most gratifying, and engender memories that last a lifetime. Sport has
as well large aspects of tradition and ceremony. When rules are changedas all rules must
change the outcry from enraged fans is thunderous. We meet together to attend sporting ritual,
and treat our local teams as our own champions, and live vicariously through our chosen
representatives. Many fans stick with teams through a lifetime, and will defend them through
defeat and decrepitude, always hoping for the one bright shining of a champion season. Many of

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us replace religion with a shared communally attended Sport. It is physical training that is the
fundamental of any sporting discipline, and most of us need many, many hours of devoted
training. The long slog of a good training routine clears out the mind, and often leads to insight
of an unexpected, intuitive nature.
Gymnasiums and sporting venues can then be seen as temples dedicated to the complete
person, cool and hot at the same time, a fusion of polarities of mind, soul and body. If we neglect
one part of this unity, the whole suffers. Johnson Gymnasium is for me such a temple, a noble
building that houses dreams, aspirations musings, and hard, hard work. I find it also very
beautiful, with purple and green terrazzo floors, celadon wall tiles, magnificent sweeps of
polished maple gym floors, stunning open arenas, vaulted as is a cathedral to the metal roof, a
most elegant facade-covered for the most part by additions, no matter, it is the function that
countsand for me, the best part, we human animals going about the poetry of our quotidian in
the hope of some finer yet to come. The finer never comes without work upon work, yet also
play and joy and reverence and tradition and respect and novelty and virtue, applied in a technic
that is an illustration of our most ethical selves, of the selves we can but strive for. Something as
simple as Sport can be a prism into our best selvesthe ones we dream of. To the Joy of Sport.