All those pictures are from Gregory Gym, before it was renovated and before there was a separate rec center on UT's campus. We lived about 2 miles from campus growing up, and my dad was a big-time gymrat. And the old Gregory Gym was the perfect place to be a rat. Gyms just aren't made like that anymore. It smelled like leather and sweat throughout. It had tunnels, back stairways, Russian-style basement freeweight rooms.
My dad used to take me, frequently, with him while he played pick-up basketball when I was 7 or 8, maybe 6. I never really watched him play, don't even have one memory of him in a game. But I roamed the building, which comes back in my memory now as leather-dark and slightly acrid-smelling. I never remember being bored and I don't know how he found me when it was time to go, because I just roamed; it was so maze-y and convoluted, I never mapped it in my head; every time I went, it was like exploring a strange, dark, thousand-doored planet for the first time.
Sometimes I would go to some special back stairwell, I could never remember exactly where it was, where there was a room with ping-pong tables and soda/snack machines. People, usually Asians, were sometimes playing games. I would watch for a few minutes and go on. On some ground floor, I could never map this either, there was a concrete, dark, dungeon-like area that had little cave-entrances lining the walls that led to squash rooms. But it was all smooth, dark-grey concrete down there, the ceilings were high, concrete in my memory. There were steam rooms, but never went in there, thankfully.
I remember, one day when I was in the squash-dungeon and just roaming around and trying all the doors I came across, I exited the gym accidentally from one of those metal whirling gates that only let you go one way. I remember standing there, locked out of my planet, tossed out onto the unsafe blaring-white plain of normal life. I stared at the exit and tried to get in, and just kept trying. Then I started crying and roaming around, I didn't know where I was. I was just below from the main entrance, but didn't figure that out for a while. I just cried and had a lost-planet feel and sat outside the welcome entrance. Finally one of the greeters noticed a despondent world-wrecked child, crying, near her entrance, and she, figuring out what happened, waived me through. I was surprised; I felt I had been forsaken by the world. It was too easy just to walk back in. But walk back in I did, a little, probably a lot, of the magic shaken out of me.
I was pretty relentless about checking all the doors in the place. There were nooks and crannies all over the place and two or three doors at each. The Longhorns used to play their basketball games there, before they moved to the wretched Frank Erwin Center.
One of the most amazing parts of the gym, in my memory, was the entrance to the basketball courts. I remember walking with my dad - we would go to the underground, dungeon, convoluted, huge locker room first, where he must have changed and stuff, but I never remember what we did, I was in the oblivion of childhood. I remember walking with my dad to the courts up some wide open-aired concrete stairway, that stood at the heart of the building. It wasn't too open-aired, but open-aired enough, and central enough, to hear the metal clanging of the free weights in the weightroom on the bottom floor and some lifting-grunts, some distance squash echoing sounds from those caves somewhere far off in the belly of the beast, and the squeak, yells and pounding-ball sound of the courts up top on the third floor. There was a thin black metal railing framing the inside of the double-backing stairway. I remember always being really excited on the ascent, I don't know why. Maybe because the entrance was so classic and cool. Once at the top of the stairway, there was a high-ceilinged concrete hallway with two double-doored (always wide open) entrances to two sets of basketball courts. It was awesome, very dramatic. You couldn't totally see what was through the doorways, which each had about a 20-feet lead narrow hallway, lined with old-time porcelain water fountains, that lead up to the courts. The pick-up ball side (renovated now, in the bright, airy, modern style; hard to believe this is the same space. Seems impossible.) had three (maybe four?) full courts side by side, separated by huge, draping, white-mesh see-through dividers, with heavy blue plastic lining the bottom 3 feet or so.
The other side was a wide-open ancient-ceilinged arena, with elevated bleachers, 14 feet above the court - you could look up and see the jutting concrete base about 10 feet above your head as you walked the court's baseline – encircling it. It had concrete steps between each bleacher section that led, on the street side, to a spider-webbery set of dusty windows, that let in a soft, old light, near an old enclosed press box. Inertia felt doubled here as you looked way down on the court below, all the smooth, concrete, dark grey steps leading the way down to the court's overlook, your mind spun a little, and it took some effort, it seemed, to not just slowly tip head-forward and fall-roll downstairs into the concrete overlook and then onto the court. A little nose-bleedish, a little vertigo.
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