12/4/2023 0 Comments Female boxer braids boxing fighterBeginning in first grade, she was bullied by a handful of other students, who made fun of her small stature and her frizzy hair. In grade school, Claressa was scarecrow thin and one of the quietest girls in her class. 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. She would tell herself that she would be an ideal mother-loving, doting, nurturing. Little Claressa’s goal in life was to have 10 kids by the time she was 26. We had to fend for ourselves.”Īdams was not made available to Bleacher Report for this story. 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. “My mom was an alcoholic, and she didn’t know how to keep her priorities straight,” Claressa said. Claressa said Adams would disappear for days at a time, leaving her alone with her three siblings. 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. "In a way, she’s hitting everyone back who ever messed with her.”Īn intensely shy child, Shields rarely strung together more than two words before the age of five she essentially spoke in monosyllables. And now it’s like every punch she throws comes from a place where she wants to get that respect back. She comes from a hard, hard background where she was disrespected a lot. She wants to tear her opponent apart with no mercy. “I don’t get angry when I fight, but Claressa literally gets angry, like in a rage. “It is both very beautiful and very scary to see Claressa shadowbox,” Mayer said. 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. 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. 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.īut 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. 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. 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. Mayer looked on in awe at the ferocity of her punches. She watched in silence as the hard girl from Flint, Michigan, shadowboxed in the nude. The silhouette of Shields held her eyes.įor one minute, two, three, Mayer-also a boxer on the U.S. She opened her eyes to see a bare figure several feet away, her outline framed by the moonlight pouring through the window. On the other side of the room, tucked under her bed sheets, Mikaela Mayer stirred awake. Within seconds, the 5’10", 165-pound middleweight was in a trance-like state, her escape to another world complete. 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. 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. 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.
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