Claressa Shields: Superstar & Beyond

Claressa Shields: Superstar & Beyond

Claressa Shields didn’t just steal the show on Saturday night. She owned it. Booed into the ring. Cheered out of it. Shields came to the ring a star. And left it a superstar.

From growing up in poverty in Flint, Michigan, Shields can now look forward to riches beyond even her own exceptionally high expectations. The price for work will have considerably risen as a result of her mesmerising spellbinding performance on Saturday night. A potential stumbling block for anyone requiring her services. They will need to pay heavily. And deservedly so.

Shields has only lost once in her boxing life. A little itch that needed scratching. A loss that needed reversing. Shields did it in the most emphatic fashion. Underrated and underappreciated before. Anything but now.

The now undisputed middleweight champion of the world has seen much darkness in her quite incredible if harrowing life. A survivor of repeated sexual abuse as a child brought up with an alcoholic mother. Shields also overcame a debilitating childhood stammer that restricted many things in those adolescent early years. Dealing with many demons in her life, Shields even wrote a suicide note when she was just 13. But boxing was her outlet, her saviour even. It gave her purpose and much more. It allowed her to open up about her childhood trauma, to others, but more importantly to herself.

The narrative around her fight with Savannah Marshall on Saturday night was primarily based on one fight in 2012. Shields, then a teenager lost to Marshall in the 2012 world amateur championships. People remembered that forgetting that in subsequent tournaments that both attended, Shields won gold, Marshall didn’t. The loss that Shields suffered in China built the story and sold the fight. Revenge and redemption, but even that probably weren’t enough for Shields. On the biggest night of her boxing life, Shields wanted more. You sense, it was about proving how great she was, not just to Marshall, but to everyone who had ever doubted her. Point now proved.

Shields fought with anger and spite from the opening seconds. The look to the crowd at the end of that sensational opening round, was a look of I told you all. Peter Fury in the opposite corner told Marshall, she can’t keep this up. Fury was wrong. She did. Marshall never stopped trying to salvage something from the abyss, but even a few seconds in you had the feeling it would all be in vain. A savage fight. A very good fight. But in no way a close one. There were calls for a rematch. But we have already seen who is the better fighter. A rematch is highly unlikely to change that. Why go over old ground when there is new ground to cover.

There are options for the two-time Olympic gold medallist and three-time undisputed champion, a possible fight with the unified super-welterweight champion Natasha Jonas has already been teased. Both are tempted. Jonas has to get past Marie-Eve Dicaire in November first, and Shields now has PFL MMA commitments to honour, but the seeds of a future fight have been more than planted. Jonas would take it in America, but Liverpool seems more natural. The boos will be louder than in London. In different ways, both will be inspired by them.

But for now, Shields has every right to celebrate her moment. Criminally undervalued prior to Saturday night, the odds said it was a genuine 50/50 fight, maybe we didn’t need the benefit of hindsight, to realise it wasn’t. Shields just has it, that star quality that very few fighters have. Those that didn’t see it before. Do now. At 27, Shields will only get better, a fighter still improving and one that will grow with the new challenges that await her. Saturday night was an iconic one for women’s boxing. Progress and acceptance seamlessly entwined with the promise of more. Shields is very much part of the present day but will undoubtedly play a major part in the future. Her star shines bright, but based on what we saw at the O2, we are nowhere near the peak yet.

Photo Credit: Lawrence Lustig/Boxxer