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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — In the dark of night, she slipped out of bed. Naked, she rose to her feet.
The clock was approaching 4 a.m. in Tijuana, Mexico, on June 7, 2015. In a few hours, she would fight and vanquish a boxer from Brazil, transforming the young woman’s delicate face into a swollen, bloody mess over four rounds.
But now in the small hours of the morning—a time that is always thick with possibility for the best female boxer on the planet—Claressa Shields, the daughter of an underground street fighter, a hard man who once made $35,000 cash for cracking the jaw of a bricklayer in a parking garage, had work to do.
She moved close to the window in her hotel room on the upper floor of a high-rise, tiptoeing so she wouldn’t disturb her sleeping roommate. She stretched her arms. She loosened her neck. Then, in the quiet, she began doing what her dad taught her, swinging her fists through the air, slowly at first, then faster—a hook, an uppercut, a double jab, a cross.
The first American female boxer to win an Olympic gold medal started to bob and weave and shuffle her feet as she punched an imaginary opponent. Within seconds, the 5’10", 165-pound middleweight was in a trance-like state, her escape to another world complete.
On the other side of the room, tucked under her bed sheets, Mikaela Mayer stirred awake. She opened her eyes to see a bare figure several feet away, her outline framed by the moonlight pouring through the window. The silhouette of Shields held her eyes.
For one minute, two, three, Mayer—also a boxer on the U.S. Olympic team—didn’t lift her gaze. She watched in silence as the hard girl from Flint, Michigan, shadowboxed in the nude.
Mayer looked on in awe at the ferocity of her punches. She marveled at the quickness of her hands—it was as if she could unleash five rapid-fire punches in the blink of an eye, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam—and the lightness of her feet.
This was Shields, awash in the pale light, free-styling like a jazz musician, improvising different punching combinations and attacking different areas of the body of the make-believe fighter in front of her.
Shields has been shadowboxing since she first started fighting as an 11-year-old, and now Mayer was astonished by the rhythm and beauty of her movements—Shields was part dancer, part performance artist and 100 percent badass.
But more than anything, there was a release of rage that Mayer could feel from the other side of the room, an explosion of emotion in those punches that were delivered with the fury of someone who has been wronged. There was anger in her movements, an anger that those close to her say boils and rises from the darkness of her past—from her shattered childhood, from being bullied in school, from the trauma of sexual abuse.
Oh yes, her friends will tell you, those old horrors are now her fuel, the combustible octane that nourishes the fire that strikes so violently out of Shields’ hands—even when she spars with nothing but air.
“It is both very beautiful and very scary to see Claressa shadowbox,” Mayer said. “I don’t get angry when I fight, but Claressa literally gets angry, like in a rage. She wants to tear her opponent apart with no mercy. She comes from a hard, hard background where she was disrespected a lot. And now it’s like every punch she throws comes from a place where she wants to get that respect back.
"In a way, she’s hitting everyone back who ever messed with her.”
To understand 21-year-old Claressa Shields—to know what flames that full-blast internal furnace—you need to travel to the hardscrabble north side of Flint, Michigan, to the neighborhood where she grew up, which is filled with burnt-out shells of houses and other decaying homes that have been long abandoned and are surrounded by tall grass.
An intensely shy child, Shields rarely strung together more than two words before the age of five; she essentially spoke in monosyllables. Her father, Clarence “Bo Bo” Shields, missed most of her early years; he was in prison from 1996 to 2004 for a breaking-and-entering conviction. Her mother, Marcella Adams, abused alcohol and struggled to keep a job. Claressa said Adams would disappear for days at a time, leaving her alone with her three siblings.
“My mom was an alcoholic, and she didn’t know how to keep her priorities straight,” Claressa said. “A lot of days we went without eating. Other times me and my sister would leave the house at six in the morning to go looking for Mom because we hadn’t seen her for two or three days. We had to fend for ourselves.”
Adams was not made available to Bleacher Report for this story.
Little Claressa’s goal in life was to have 10 kids by the time she was 26. She would tell herself that she would be an ideal mother—loving, doting, nurturing. She was determined to one day show her own mother what responsible motherhood really looked like by having one baby a year for a decade.
In grade school, Claressa was scarecrow thin and one of the quietest girls in her class. Beginning in first grade, she was bullied by a handful of other students, who made fun of her small stature and her frizzy hair. Students often would take her school papers, rip them in half and toss them into the trash can. Other times, they would shove her to the ground.
For several years, Claressa didn’t fight back. She was still trying to process and make sense of what happened to her when she was five. At that point, her mom had a job at Wal-Mart, and several times when she was at work, Claressa says her mom’s boyfriend led her into a room and raped her. Claressa later believed she was targeted because she so rarely talked.
“My mom didn’t believe me when I told her I was raped,” said Claressa, who first went public with the rape allegations in the August 2012 edition of Essence magazine. “But my grandmother knew that I was telling the truth. She gave me a baby doll, and I explained to her what happened to me using the doll.”
Overcome with feelings of shame, guilt and embarrassment, Claressa moved in with her grandmother, Joanne Adams. Claressa eventually was taken to the hospital, but too much time had passed to detect any sexual abuse. No charges were filed against the boyfriend, but Flint street justice was administered: According to Clarence Shields, a family member beat up the boyfriend.
“The guy who did it disappeared and left town,” Clarence said. “When I got out of prison, I looked into it. I promised my family I wouldn’t do anything to make me go back to prison. But that’s my baby he did this to. If I ever see him, I will slide a knife into him.”
On the day he was freed from prison in 2004, Clarence was reintroduced to his nine-year-old daughter. Seeing her dad for the first time in her memory, Claressa was thunderstruck. Suddenly it was as if she had unlocked the answers to so many questions. This is why I am the way I am, she thought.
“My dad just looks mean, and I have that same demeanor,” Claressa said. “Suddenly a lot of things started to make sense to me.”
“I saw my twin,” Clarence said. “I saw my beautiful twin.”
Clarence started picking up his daughter from school on most afternoons. Claressa had lived like a nomad for years—she’d stayed in nearly a dozen different houses and apartments in the first decade of her life—but now having her father back in her life rooted her in a routine.
But Claressa didn’t tell her dad that she was being bullied at school. Then, one afternoon when she was in fifth grade, another student finally pushed Claressa over the brink. For the first time in a school hallway, Claressa raised her fists, her blood hot. With a few swings, 11-year-old Claressa had a crossed a pivotal line of demarcation in her life. No longer would she take it. The bully ended up on the ground in a whirling daze, and Claressa won her first school fight.
“I didn’t want to fight at first, but I finally just told myself that I needed to stick up for myself,” she said. “I was sick of being messed with. I quickly found out that people won’t bully you if you fight back. That was the beginning for me.”
On their after-school drives together, Clarence regaled his daughter with tales from his boxing past. After a brief amateur career—he had a record of 27-0—he joined an underground fight club.
“I traveled around the country to fight guys in places like hotel parking lots, underground garages and in ditches,” Clarence said. “Most of the time we wore six-ounce gloves." But if they didn't have gloves, Clarence said it would just be his two fists "doing the work themselves.”
He estimates that he had 55 unsanctioned fights against tough guys who by day were construction workers, security guards and bricklayers—and that he won 54 times. He said he routinely earned $5,000 to $20,000 for each victory.
“They called me ‘Cannonballs’ because I had a bad habit of trying to break forearms with my fists,” he said. “My face is still pretty, though. Can’t say that about those boys I took down.”
One afternoon in the car, not long after Claressa had stood up to the school bully, Clarence began talking to his daughter about Muhammad Ali. “None of Muhammad’s sons took up after their dad and became fighters,” Clarence told Claressa. “But his daughter, Laila, did. She became a great fighter just like her old man.”
Clarence didn’t intend to encourage his daughter to fight, but his comments planted the seed of a dream in Claressa’s imagination: Maybe she could box just like Laila Ali?
The rush of pride that had coursed through her when she bested that bully was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She wanted more of that feeling, that natural high, so two days after her dad mentioned the name “Laila,” Claressa asked if she could sign up for boxing lessons.
“Hell no,” Clarence replied. “You just gone and lost your mind, little girl. Boxing is a man’s sport. There’s no future in it for families.” Hearing her dad’s stern reply, Claressa cried.
But Claressa already was something of a fighter, and she pestered him for days. A week later, after Clarence had talked to some of his old fighting buddies and learned that the sport of female boxing was growing, he told Claressa he was taking her to McDonald’s for an after-school snack. Instead, he drove her to Berston Field House.
Together, father and daughter walked into the musty basement gym, where there was one ring, three heavy bags and a heater that was on the fritz. Clarence figured his daughter would last a few days, maybe a week.
