SPORTS ILLUSTRATED 36JOET TA CL ARK
TRACK AND FIELD
When Florida sophomore Talitha Diggs dashed across the finish
line in 50.98 seconds on March 12 at the NCAA Indoor Track and
Field Championships in Birmingham, she didn’t simply win the
400-meter title. She captured a piece of history.
Thirty-nine years earlier, her mother, Joetta Clark, took home
the NCAA indoor crown in the 800 meters, her first of nine overall
titles during her storied career at Tennessee in the 1980s. With
the 19-year-old sprinter’s indoor title, the pair became the first
mother and daughter to both win an NCAA championship in an
individual event—a feat that squarely represents the wave of athletic
opportunities that began to be afforded to women only after the
passage of Title IX in ’72.
Running became a family affair thanks to Joe Louis Clark, Joetta’s
father, the no-nonsense, inner-city New Jersey high school principal
who was famously portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the 1989 movie
Lean on Me. His tough love and unorthodox disciplinary measures
helped turn around one of the
state’s most troubled schools, and
he took the same approach with
his three children, particularly on
the track. Clark pushed 12-year-
old Joetta into distance running,
not sprinting, because he sought
to prove that Black people could
succeed in longer races, too.
Armed with her father’s tena-
cious spirit, Clark never lost an
800-meter race during her four
years at Columbia High School in
Maplewood, N.J., from 1976 to ’80;
in fact, to this day, she holds the
state’s outdoor record in the event.
During her four years as a Vol, she
was a 15-time All-American, a nine-time national champion and
10-time SEC champion. It wasn’t until she arrived on campus that
she realized the impact of Title IX. It was the first time she saw
women in sports leadership roles.
“My track and field coach was Terry Crawford, Pat Summitt
was doing basketball, Gloria Ray was the athletic director and
Debby Jennings was the [sports information director],” Clark says.
“It was inspiring to see all of these women in charge and winning.”
After college, she became a four-time Olympian, running at the
pro level for more than 28 consecutive years. By the time Clark
entered in her final Olympics in Sydney 2000, her half sister, Hazel,
15 years her junior, was making headlines of her own in the half-
mile distance and competing in her first Summer Games. By then,
the path had already been paved. Hazel never had to fight for the
amenities she enjoyed: the expensive equipment, the nice facilities,
the chartered f lights, the prestigious meets and more.“To her, it was always like this. She didn’t take
it for granted, but it just didn’t register,” Clark
says. “They think they’ve arrived. But my gen-
eration, we were far from arriving. So we had to
press forward—as women, as Black women, as
women running distance.”
Now 59, Clark says it was the groundwork
set by the women at Tennessee that inspired
her current career as a motivational speaker
and founder of the Joetta Clark Diggs Sports
Foundation, which promotes participation in
athletics. Just as she did with her sister, Clark
reminds Talitha of the sacrifices that came before
her, of the women who paved the way. “What
I do now is very focused on what I saw then,”
she says. —Jamie LisantiAN
DY(^) LY
ON
S/G
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AG
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“IT WAS
INSPIRING TO
SEE ALL OF
THESE
WOMEN IN
CHARGE AND
WINNING
AT TENNESSEE.”
50 Y E ARS OF TITLE IX