Diggin’ Joetta Clark Diggs at Johnston

The four-time Olympian inspired a rapt audience with talk of courage, integrity and perseverance.

Olympic athletes don’t come around here very often, and they certainly don’t come to Moravian University’s campus nearly often enough, which is why there was so much buzz around when news first leaked that the inimitable Joetta Clark Diggs was coming by for a visit.

For those unaware of her place in the culture, Clark Diggs, the daughter of Joe Clark, the equally inimitable principal portrayed by Morgan Freeman in the film Lean on Me, is nothing short of American track-and-field royalty. In her teens and early twenties, she starred on the blocks and in the classroom at the University of Tennessee at a time when the state’s colleges continued to serve as the epicenter of women’s track and field dating back to the 1960s when the members of the famed Tennessee State TigerBelles-- featuring the likes of Mae Faggs, Willye White, and the incomparable Wilma Rudolph-- were destroying existing records and raising the bar of excellence with every leap and bound.

But while the TigerBelles may have set the standard for excellence in the sport, Clark Diggs was part of a larger family affair that featured her sister Hazel and her sister-in-law Jearl Miles-Clark, all of whom were coached by older bother J.J. Clark with remarkable success, perhaps best exemplified when the trio finished 1-2-3 in the 800m in the 2000 US Olympic trials, where they won the right to represent the US together in the Sydney Summer Games. That Clark Diggs was 38 at the time simply adds luster to her legend, but it also served to underscore her place in the larger panorama of women’s sports then as now.

Since retired from her days as a middle-distance dynamo, Clark Diggs, who went on to earn a graduate degree in recreation administration before founding the Joetta Clark Diggs Sports Foundation, has turned her considerable experiences on and off the cinders toward another passion of hers: motivational speaking, and particularly that geared toward young female athletes, which is precisely why Moravian Athletic Director George Bright arranged for her visit, that not-so-coincidentally, came about during the campus-wide celebration of Women’s History Month. And it was in Johnston’s gymnasium where she captivated a crowd of Moravian student athletes, both male and female, with talk of pride, purpose, perseverance, perturbation, and patience, the five Ps that make up her five pillars of excellence in life.

In a style suggesting two parts life coach and one part AME minister, Clark Diggs ran her audience through the trials and tribulations of her own life, extolling the virtues found in athletic competition while admonishing those who find solace solely in sport, reminding that such singular attitudes lead too often to disappointment and a decided lack of preparedness for the rigors of adult life ahead. She spoke candidly about the importance of failure as something to be embraced, observing that it presents opportunities for learning as well as the possibilities for transcendence through perseverance. She railed on against those tendencies that allow defeat to consume us, offering up Jackson 5-esque reminders of such negative thinking that ranges from the ABCs of purposefulness to the 1-2-3s of patience found broadly in the wellspring of opportunities for community engagement while the audience followed along attentively, ensnared by her free-flowing, almost lyrical delivery. All the while, she’d stop to poke fun at her own foibles with quips along the lines of “I am a Triple A personality” followed by reminders that for all her success and glory, she holds no gold medals. This admixture of candor and humility seemed to strike a chord with her audience, which was most obvious in the nature and quality of the questions asked during the open Q & A that followed.

Of those, and just before the evening came to a close, the final exchange was perhaps the best metaphor for the evening as our own in-house motivational dynamo, Coach Spirk, asked our guest most succinctly about how best one might find balance amid the dust and noise of contemporary life. Clark Diggs pondered the moment, albeit briefly, and then reminded all that keeping eyes locked on the bigger prize remains the best remedy for effectively combating the sort of day-to-day smog that leads to doubt and ultimately subverts our individual and collective efforts.

It was a quite gracious performance from a quite gracious and hopeful speaker who tailored her remarks for her audience while not speaking down to them. She was throughout informative, affable and quite charming, being sure to address the concerns of all while offering up real solutions for those on the verge of facing some very real challenges ahead both on the field of play and off. And in this regard, the night was, as expected, a rousing success.