Mid-City Barbell, Farewell!

Mid City Mall will go dark in another month or so.  Most of the mall stores are gone already, with a few hanging on, I suppose, clutching at the last dollars they can make before they move on or wink out of existence.  No doubt about it, Mid City Mall will close its doors and be torn down in the very near future.  What is not commonly known is that with that closure something shining and wonderful will end and be carried only as a memory of the way things used to be, and the weird thing is that it is the gym, Mid-City Barbell.

            I know. I sound like an old man, bitching about changes I don’t like.  I am.  I’m seventy-two and still hitting the gym about as hard as I can three days a week—which is to say, not as hard as I used to! That’s just reality.  Too many things, maybe, in my life, have been razed to make way for progress or because it was just time for those things to go.  Certainly, nothing lasts forever.  But what is genuine, what is good, what is profound, ought to get some mention before it is just swept up with the rest of the rubble to make way for the shiny new things that lack heart, soul, and grit.

Sure, when MCB’s doors close, I will work out somewhere.  There are gyms aplenty in Louisville, though most of them are large, impersonal places where people are there to sell an idea of working out for people who feel intimidated about exercise. I feel a great swell of pity for those folks. However, the beauty of what has been Mid City Barbell is that its members, for the most part, have come there to train because they want to train, need to train, love to train.  They like the struggle, the push and pull, and they like knowing that, at MCB, they can talk about this avocation with people who know what they are doing, people whose learning curve is as long as the rest of their lives, people who know that working out is more than just doing something to get in shape or look better. Most people see lifting weights as something that one stops after awhile. For people like me, like the MCB crowd, it’s like breathing. And we have breathed so freely at Mid-City barbell.

Those who think like this have made Mid City Barbell a friendly, calm, good-natured place to be. The place has become a source of energy because of its people. Its members have grown to care for each other, like a family, and now that family is splitting apart. We are losing touch with each other, going our separate ways, never, and I mean never ever, having the chance to come back home, which, I suppose, is what families do in reality. Even if someone comes along and buys all the weights, benches, squat racks, bars and dumbbells and moves it all to another location, the place, the home place for many lifters, will be gone. We might find each other in other gyms, but it will not be this place that has given us a home away from home.

And, yes, we will be okay training somewhere else, even if it is in a place that would likely label each of us a “lunk.” See, the thing is, the thing worth mentioning before the wrecking balls start, is that none of has to have a thing of beauty to survive. We’ll live, but that thing of beauty, power, and grace, that place that always welcomes us and likes what we do, will be gone. Something phenomenal is not necessary to do business. We can train and even pay dues at new gyms, but will we ever belong anywhere like we have belonged here? Thanks to T.L., Matt, Jimmy, Steve, and all the others who have fed their energy into that place over the last forty years plus, those of us who keep the memory of Mid-City Barbell alive will remember the true gold that is buried under the shiny new, upscale stores.

I can only hope that in, say, five years’ time, the ghost of Old Steve Matcek, the Ur Lunk himself, will push his ghostly wheelchair up from the grocery store foundations, laughing at the horrified upscale shoppers, a Rob Zombie piece will take over the store speakers, and Steve will say, “Put that phone down and lift something!”  That, too, would be beautiful, and beauty, like energy, must transform.  It cannot be destroyed and, I pray, will not be forgotten.

Pax,

MJ