What's a lady doing in your corner as a boxing coach?
Right before Joe Gill stepped into the ring to claim his first B.C. Golden Gloves boxing championship he thought about the sacrifices his coach, Betty Clark, had made to build Shaolin Boxing Club and create a gym that offered fighters like himself a safe haven from the hazards of street life.
He'd been hearing the whispers from the established boxing fraternity and their skepticism about Clark's ability to teach a fighter to make it to the top, and it bothered him.
So he let his fists do the talking.
"I remember Betty told me, 'Joe, this is it, this is going to put us on the map,'" said Gill, who won that 1995 title fight and went on to score a victory later that year over national 165-pound champion Keith Gurski of Prince Rupert.
Gill first met Clark when he attended one of her Saturday morning kung fu sessions and she was his kickboxing coach when he was only 12 and had to lie about his age for his first fight. Having grown up in an inner-city district in Prince George where families struggled to pay their bills, Gill knows what Clark did to level the playing field for the young boxers and kickboxers who showed up at Shaolin headquarters at the Connaught Youth Centre.
"She never turned a kid away from that gym, even if that kid had no money, as long as they wanted to learn and showed respect," said Gill. "She changed a lot of lives, a lot of kids. Honestly, if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be here today, I wouldn't be successful - just the discipline in life that I got from her.
"It's such a good feeling when you see these guys she coached and now they have wives and kids and it's pretty cool when they say, 'Betty changed my life,' or 'When I was going through a tough time, Betty was always there.' She was the heart of the community. She was an amazing lady."
Clark died Nov. 6 at age 69 at UHNBC after emergency surgery to address a stomach ailment.
Over the course of its 25-year history, Shaolin has produced a long line of accomplished boxers/kickboxers who learned their craft working with Clark. That list includes Gill, Alex Alvarez, Edwin Rodriguez, Todd Hatley, Jag Seehra, Mandy Lapointe, Kristen Josephson, Lianne Bunting, Brian Gervais, Mitch Ott, Trent Price, Anup Sandhu, Robert Doane, Armin Sandhu, Nathan Bates, Ryan Smith and Arleigh Turner.
Clark trained hundreds more martial artists, kickboxers and boxers in the Shaolin gym. But it wasn't just the chance to learn fighting skills and the confidence that inspired that lured many of the teenaged youth who showed up for their lessons. What set Clark apart was her compassion and the stability she provided as a surrogate mom. She was tough when she needed to be and would not tolerate disrespect. But if she saw that glimmer of desire and a willingness to put in the work there was no limit to the efforts she made to bring out the best in her fighters.
Seehra, who went on to win 11 B.C. provincial amateur boxing championships with the Inner City Boxing Club, started his combative sports career as a kickboxer when he was 13 and remembers feeling the sting of a boxing glove on a stick Clark used as a training tool to practice his head movement.
"She was a good coach and she trained some good fighters," said Seehra. "I was a young guy in an older crowd so she always made me feel part of the team. She was just a super-awesome person and she had a huge impact on the community with the kids. Everybody was there because it was so affordable."
Josephson (whose married name is McBurnie) was 14 when she signed up for Clark's boxing classes for girls and in February 1995 in Comox at the height of her two-year amateur career she became the first female Shaolin boxer to win B.C. Games gold. Now working for School District 57 as an aboriginal educator, McBurnie developed a deep connection to Clark that went well beyond boxing circles.
"I went through some tough times as a teenager and Betty was always there and would take us in when we needed a place to stay," said McBurnie. "She was a second mom to a lot of us kids. For me as a teenager, not making great choices in life, Betty was the one who would turn us around and steer us back in the right direction.
"She was hard-core as a coach, but she cared. If you didn't have your hands up she'd give you a little tap on the head and there was no standing around, you were there to work. There was no messing around and if you worked hard you got to go to those matches. We were there because we wanted to compete and we wanted to win and Betty made that happen for us. She was a real role model."
The fight game started for Clark when she got her son and daughter involved in kung fu as youngsters. Before long she joined the classes and became a black belt in kung fu. In the late '80s she started Shaolin Temple Kung Fu, sharing the Connaught gym with Cobra Kickboxing. While Clark never competed in kung fu or boxing she was never afraid to get into the sparring ring.
"I don't ask someone to do something if I can't do it myself," she once told Citizen reporter Gordon Hoekstra. "If you have this training and don't use it, it's wasted. You can do it, and do it safely without people getting hurt."
Shaolin was granted its boxing club charter in May 1993 just before Alvarez became the first Shaolin fighter to compete at B.C. Golden Gloves. Alvarez went on to fight at the national championships that year in Winnipeg and Clark was there in his corner as B.C's first-ever female coach.
Boxing was popular in the city in the early '90s and it was a natural progression for Clark to open her new club, with her son Jason and daughter Candice helping out as coaches. There was no shortage of naysayers at the time who thought Clark was out of her league, encroaching on a male-dominated bastion.
"When she first started everybody thought we were crazy and didn't think we belonged there and did everything they could to keep us out of there, but we showed them," said Candice.
Lapointe was Shaolin's most prominent female fighter. She spent 18 months learning the basics with Clark before moving to Vancouver to became a national champion in 2001 and went on to fight pro for two years.
At the time she started the club, Clark had her own business cleaning offices. In August 2000 she began a new career as an outreach youth care worker, working with teens at Reconnect Youth Village, a shelter for teens at the Prince George Native Friendship Centre, where she worked at the time of her death. She steered many of her young clients, male and female, into the boxing gym, where they could take out their aggressions punching the bags.
"It gave them a sense of discipline and a sense of belonging - it gave them another family," said Candice. "She had enough love to share for everybody."
Clark, a native of Sutton, Que., came to B.C. when she was 19, first moving to Smithers. She was a huge fan of martial arts movies and it became a regular ritual for the Shaolin contingent to gather the night before a road trip for a sleep-over at Clark's house, watching Bruce Lee movies on Betamax tapes.
Spruce Capital Warriors Boxing Club head coach Wayne Sponagle worked with Clark for more than two decades trying to match boxers on pro and amateur boxing cards. He said her coaching and training philosophies were a departure from what was considered conventional boxing wisdom but he always respected Clark's efforts to develop her athletes, in and out of the ring.
"I always got along good with Betty - I didn't always agree with her but anybody who gives up the time she did freely to the kids, I respect," said Sponagle. "She worked hard and she was always trying to better herself and therefore trying to better her boxers. There are very few people who do it so long, not having a family member boxing. She used to take a lot of the kids that she met through her job and would get them going to her gym.
"She really wholeheartedly cared about her kids. She watched out for them and she made sure nobody was going to take advantage of them. She's going to be missed on the boxing scene as well as being a good citizen of Prince George."
In April 1999, Clark became Canada's first female Level 5 boxing coach. At the time she received her certificate, four years after she got her Level 4, Clark explained what motivated her to put in long hours of study time to pass the required courses needed for Level 5 status. She thought it would benefit her own boxers.
"This lets me on all the training the national team is getting and, of course, my club gets it too, so my guys have a big advantage before they even hit the national level," she told The Citizen.
Clark oversaw several national team training camps and coached the Canadian women's team at an international tournament in England, where she was thrilled to meet Dolph Lundgren, of Rocky movie fame, who was coaching the Russian team.
Clark was coaching right up until the time she got sick and was planning on taking a few boxers to a card in Quesnel last Saturday. Teaching her three-year-old grandson Keagan to punch and kick was her latest boxing project.
Plans are in the works to keep the Shaolin club open in 2019, but it will shut down for the month of December.
Clark and Gill had been offering boxing classes to elementary school kids on Fridays and Gill says he plans to fulfill Shaolin's commitment to work with the kids.
