Colorado State University's imposing blond brick fieldhouse sat there, taunting me, during a recent visit to the university one mid-October morning.
Technically, I was there to see about a tree — a small, shrublike second-generation "Olympic" oak cordoned off by a metal guard and marked with an inconspicuous plaque on the eastern edge of campus.
I was almost immediately greeted with a larger-than-life picture of Glenn Morris fixed to the building's entry wall. In it, he's young, wearing an Aggie track and field uniform and rearing back to throw a javelin. Just to the right of him was a large glass display case filled with Morris memorabilia — his Aggie "A" athletic letter, framed black-and-white pictures of him as a CSU track star in the early 1930s and a dark bound yearbook of sorts from Morris' time competing in the 1936 Summer Olympics.
But, after spotting and photographing the tree, my eyes kept flitting to the fieldhouse. It was right there. I had to poke my head inside.
Those Olympics were where Morris made a name for himself, going from a relative nobody to an Olympic decathlon champion in a matter of days. The games — hosted by Nazi Germany in Berlin and seen by Adolf Hitler as the perfect stage to prove his racist myths of Aryan supremacy — also served as a dark precursor to World War II.
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After winning the men's decathlon, Morris came home to much fanfare in Colorado with a gold medal, a gifted European oak sapling and the world at his feet.
But following an unsuccessful attempt at acting in Hollywood, and a similarly short-lived stint in the NFL, Morris' star quickly faded. He ended up getting wounded in the Navy during World War II, working in the construction industry in California and dying there in 1974 at the age of 61, according to his obituary.
Decades later, there was a surge of renewed interest in the Olympic star. While nobody knows what happened to the oak sapling Morris brought back from Berlin and gifted to CSU, the descendant of a different Olympic oak tree was planted outside CSU's fieldhouse in 2010. The following year, the building was renamed Glenn Morris Fieldhouse.
In 2017, another descendant of an Olympic oak tree was planted in Morris' memory outside the Iris and Michael Smith Alumni Center at Canvas Stadium. Morris' gold medal rests inside a glass display case at the center. It's cool to see, don't get me wrong. But, there's just something about the fieldhouse.
The century-old building — which still serves as the indoor training facility for CSU's track teams — feels alive. It creaks and moans, and its airy indoor track space floods with streams of morning light each day. Its blond brick and Spanish clay tiles are so distinctive they're easy to spot in the background of some photos taken of Morris during his time at CSU.
Looking back at them, it's hard not to think of what came next for the young student athlete. He'd go on to graduate, train for the Olympics in that very fieldhouse and come home with a gold medal from what would become one of the most controversial and consequential Olympic games.
He'd marry and divorce and marry again. He'd try his hand at acting, professional football and insurance sales. He'd serve his country, settle into a new life out West and die relatively young.
And while his story did seem forgotten for a while, it did come back. Just look at the gold medal encased on campus, the pair of Olympic oak descendants planted on its grounds and the behemoth brick fieldhouse bearing his name.
Want to hear more about Glenn Morris?
Listen to the latest episode of the Coloradoan's history podcast, "The Way it Was." In it, host Erin Udell unravels Morris' early life, Olympic glory and final years through a series of interviews with historians and former journalists, including one Tarzan superfan. The Way it Was is available on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts and other podcast apps.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Podpast: The tremendous rise and tragic fall of Olympian Glenn Morris