Pioneer of women’s boxing sets sights on getting out of homeless shelter

Diane “Dynamite” Clark jabs, shuffling her feet, circling and throwing punches — left, right, uppercut.
At 60, Clark punches with such ferocity that an onlooker pulls away. Jab. Jab. Pop. Pop. She’s wearing a pink headband and hot-pink blouse as she shadowboxes in a community room of a Prince George’s County, Maryland homeless shelter.
She ducks an imaginary blow, her thick hands curled inside imaginary gloves, her eyes fixed on an imaginary slow-moving target.
“Whew,” she finally says after a series of rapid-fire jabs, “that’s enough.”
She sits down at a table in the shelter that was once a Capitol Heights, Maryland elementary school. Blind in one eye from a stroke, Clark peers intensely with the other, ready to tell her story. She pushes her self-published book, “Ka-POW! Get the Record Straight,” across the table. The black-and-white cover photo shows Clark in her 1979 title fight in Louisville, Kentucky against Jackie Tonawanda.
In the photo, Clark leans back on powerful, thick legs, her arm cocked in midair about to throw a right-hand punch at the woman who towers over her. The frame has frozen “Dynamite” in her prime, in better days.
“That’s me in the corner. And that’s her,” Clark recalls. “They called her ‘Lady Ali.’ She was bigger than me, but I had more muscles — look at my legs.” She beams.
After six rounds, Clark was declared the winner over Tonawanda by a split decision.
“I remember when they said I won, I jumped up. They said, ‘The light heavyweight champion of the world: Diane “Dynamite” Clark!’ I jumped up and fell to my knees and prayed. I jumped in my trainer’s arms.”
Then she waited for the presentation of her title belt. “But they didn’t give it to me,” she says. No one ever explained why.
Clark pauses and a big tear drops. “When I was little,” she says, “I had a regular belt, and I would jump up and down on my bed like I had won the championship. That was my dream — not to just win a bout but to have the belt.”
She never got the belt from the promoters that night, and it crushed her like no blow from another boxer ever could. That night in Louisville, she says, was the last night she was on top of the world.
Thirty-four years later, Clark is living at Shepherd’s Cove, the only homeless shelter for women and children in Prince George’s.
“This is where I am for now, until I find an apartment,” she says with resignation.
She wound up here after her landlord’s property was foreclosed upon. Her sister, Joyce Chase, 61, who lives in Suitland, Maryland, says she offered to let Clark stay with her family, as she’d done once before when Clark had a serious bout with the West Nile Virus. But Clark declined.
“I called Social Services and found a shelter because I didn’t want to be a burden on my family,” Clark says. “I need to be independent.”
Vania Fields, manager of Shepherd’s Cove, says she is amazed by Clark. “She has a phenomenal story,” Fields says. “I tell people, you never know where life will take you. We are all one car accident, one sick family member away from a shelter.”
Because of Clark’s partial blindness and renal failure that requires dialysis treatments, shelter officials are helping her find housing suitable for her disabilities.
Jill Morris, one of Clark’s nieces, says Clark has always been an inspiration. “She was dubbed in the family as the person of steel,” says Morris, 43, who lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland “She thrives off fighting through struggle.”
At the shelter, Clark unfolds yellowed newspaper clippings that show her breaking barriers in a male-dominated sport.
“Clark dispatches Tonawanda,” declares the Feb. 17, 1979, headline in the Louisville Courier-Journal.
Women’s boxing in the United States was in its infancy then, not the Olympic sport and professional draw it is today. Laila Ali and Jacqui Frazier — the daughters of heavyweight boxing champions Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier — had yet to command a pay-per-view audience by squaring off in 2001.