“When I fight in Detroit they got different fight fans, man, they chanting ‘Whoop That Trick,’” says boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields about her upcoming July 26 fight at Little Caesars Arena. “I can come out there and just be walking through the crowd to go to say ‘hi’ to somebody and the crowd starts going crazy and screaming. They’re excited through and through.”
Before Shields was the brightest star in women’s boxing, she was a 10-and-a-half year-old kid who sauntered into Flint’s Berston Field House with a backpack full of anger management issues and undefined goals in 2004. She had decided she wanted to be a boxer and was two weeks into her training before the coach Jason Crutchfield told her that her parents would have to officially sign her up. Her mother was OK with it but her father initially told her she was too pretty to box and that boxing was for boys. Shields wasn’t going to take no for an answer and eventually her father changed his mind.
“He always tells everybody he only signed me up because he thought I would get beat up and quit,” she tells Metro Times on a Zoom call from Atlanta. “He didn’t want me to blame him for not signing me up and letting me at least try it.”
With the help of her father Bo and coach Crutchfield, Shields trained daily with passion and purpose as she grinded out an equal amount of reps and rounds. She admits that her father and Crutchfield weren’t always on the same page when it came to her training, but they both wanted her to succeed. In 2011 she won her first Junior Olympic Championship and the National Police Athletic League Championship. When asked when she knew boxing was something that was going to change her life, she says, “Immediately.”
“I wasn’t judged,” she says. “I could run hard, sweat hard, punch the bag hard, spar hard with the boys, get out the ring, and everybody would say, ‘Good job,’ you know? And I didn’t really have much of that in my life, so that really kept me in boxing.”
She won her first Olympic gold medal in London in 2012 — making her the first American woman to win one — a feeling she calls “the best thing ever.” She followed it up with a second in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She also dominated the amateur circuit with a 77-1 amateur record to go along with the two gold medals. In 2016 she made the decision to turn pro.
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“I could have went back to the Olympics for a third and a fourth time, but God was like, ‘I got bigger plans for you,’” she says. “And even though it was no opportunities and no other woman had done what I was seeking out to do, it was always like God gave me this burning feeling in me to just know that you’re the one who’s going to change it.”
Shields has since obtained world championships in five weight classes, including the undisputed female light middleweight title in March 2021, the undisputed female middleweight title (twice) between 2019 and 2024, and the World Boxing Council (WBC) and International Boxing Federation (IBF) female super middleweight titles from 2017 to 2018. She also won the World Boxing Organization (WBO) female light heavyweight title becoming the first undisputed female heavyweight champion since February 2025. Shields is known for her punching power, accuracy, and technical skill in the ring, but cites her spiritually as her biggest advantage.
“My biggest attribute is believing in God and just believing that He knows my heart’s desires,” she says. “My heart’s desire was never to be the most sexiest boxer or to be the prettiest boxer. It was always to make a million dollars and be the best woman boxer in the world. That was always my dream.”
Her sentiments toward God are more than the usual admissions of faith we hear from athletes. For Shields, boxing was a life-saving conduit to her spiritually. During her formative years she says boxing kept her distracted from discord and helped her channel her tunnel vision and passion towards something positive.
“I got into the church because of boxing, I got baptized because of boxing, I found God that way, in a different way,” she says. “I think without boxing I would be in jail or dead.”
At only 30 years old, Shields has been ranked the world’s best active female middleweight by BoxRec and the best active female boxer, pound for pound, by ESPN and The Ring. But more impressively, she’s the face of women’s boxing and its biggest celebrity. She’s been nominated for a 2025 ESPN ESPY Award for best boxer (she previously won the award in 2023). She coined the term “GWOAT” (Greatest Woman Of All Time) for herself, and her popularity has soared among other women athletes and hip-hop’s elite. Detroit rapper Kash Doll walked and rapped Shields out to her fight against Maricela Cornejo at Little Caesars Arena on June 3, 2023. Recently Atlanta’s hip-hop community requested her presence at rapper Boosie’s pool party on June 22.
“Yeah, everybody from Flint was there, Detroit, and they were like, ‘Where you at?’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘At the gym.’”
But Shields would like to see the entire sport of women’s boxing elevate. She believes if the boxers all grow their own individual brands, it will be good for them economically and good for women’s boxing as a whole.
“I’ve always told all the girls — Alycia Baumgardner, Amanda Serrano, Katie Taylor, Shurretta Metcalf — I told so many of these girls, ‘Listen, boxing is boxing and either the fans gravitate toward you or they don’t, but please build your brand,” she says.
Shields’s rise in wins, fame, and money has not come without hiccups. Shields has had her sexuality questioned, battled misconceptions that she’s mean, and has walked away from longtime friends who saw her as nothing more than an ATM machine. She says she regrets not dissolving those relationships earlier.
“A lot of friendships have ended because of me saying no to doing things,” she says. “And I wish I would have said no sooner because the friendship wasn’t real anyway.”
Shields also has experienced a sharp rise in the amount of critics in her social media comments. She says she blocks 20 to 30 people a day without hesitation.
“It’s like an unlimited amount of haters that come out of nowhere, and it’s like they don’t know shit — I mean, like zero about me,” she says. “They just kind of come in off of knowing another celebrity or, you know, jumping into a situation that they don’t even know anything about, and start judging me.”
On Christmas Day in 2024 a biopic of Shields’s life titled The Fire Inside debuted at theaters. The movie was directed by Academy Award-winning director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and followed a young Shields (portrayed by Ryan Destiny) through the early stages of her career leading up to her first Olympic gold medal. The film was nominated for three NAACP Image Awards and won the Award for Film Excellence from the Michigan Movie Critics Guild. Shields says the movie was 95% factual but she never tried to pawn her gold medal and the roles of her mother and father played in her life were reversed.
“The role that my mom had in the movie, should have been my dad,” she says. “If you watch the movie, like how much my mom was involved, and how she was motivating me and stuff, that was honestly my dad.”
The next thing on Shields’s career bucket list outside the ring is to land a major endorsement deal (Nike Air Shields, maybe?) to go with the championships and gold medals. But inside the ring, she’s focused on getting a “W” against Lani Daniels on July 26.
“LCA does a great job of promoting the fights,” she says. “We did 12,000 [attendance] last fight, I think we can do 19,000 this time. And I’m just excited to punch Lani in the face in front of everybody in Detroit.”
Claressa Shields takes on Lani Daniels starting at 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 26 at Little Caesars Arena; 2645 Woodward Ave., Detroit; 313presents.com. Tickets start at $45.
Little Caesars Arena
2645 Woodward Ave., Detroit, MI
This article appears in Jul 23 – Aug 5, 2025.