So inevitable is change between the ages of 21 and 30, it came as no surprise when Claressa Shields, having just been asked how she had changed during that nine-year period, requested clarification. “I mean, do you want me to go through accolades or do you want me to go through my views?” she said, 10 days before defending her WBC, IBF and WBO heavyweight titles against Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Detroit.
She was, on this occasion, perfectly entitled to answer a question with a question and narrow the parameters. After all, in the time between Shields fighting Crews-Dezurn on her professional debut in 2016 and fighting her again this Sunday, a lot will have changed – too much, perhaps, to condense into a simple, generic answer. Not just that, such is Shields’ propensity for both action and drama, it is highly likely she has packed far more into nine years than most.
“Firstly, I’m way stronger than what I was in 2016,” said Shields, now 30. “I was just 21 back then. I’m also way more skilled as far as my boxing. I’ve learned how to turn over my punches and time my punches. I’ve learned about precision and how to put weight behind my punches. I had spent so long in the amateurs – winning Olympic gold medals in 2012 and 2016 – that it became all about fast hands and dominance. I’ve always been able to hit hard, but in the pros you have to settle down more and really place your shots in order to get the knockdowns and knockouts. I wasn’t really familiar with that, so it took some time. I was just kind of learning on the job.
“I think that I’ve had very tough competition in my 17 fights and in those 17 fights I have been able to get 19 titles in five different weight classes. It’s like, I was learning how to do all that on the job. Now I’ve finally got it. I think you can see in my last three fights that if I catch you, you’re either going to get knocked out or you are going to go down. I know that is one thing that has changed. Also, just my calmness now. I’m super calm now inside the ring. I think I box better.
“She [Crews-Dezurn] has gotten somewhat better, too, but I have gotten extremely better. I was great back then, but I’m greater now.”
Since boxing Shields on her pro debut in 2016, Crews-Dezurn has won 10 of her 12 professional fights and can, like Shields, proudly call herself a world champion. The only difference between them is that whereas Shields can call herself a multi-weight world champion, Crews-Dezurn has done her best work at just one weight. That weight was super middleweight, where she won the WBC, IBF and WBO titles and beat the likes of Maricela Cornejo and Shadasia Green.
Still, even if Crews-Dezurn has been unable to match the progress of Shields, the 38-year-old remains one of the bigger personalities and punchers in the women’s game and is someone Shields respects having shared a ring with her twice previously (in the pros and also in the amateurs).
“I just remember going to war for four two-minute rounds,” Shields said of their encounter in 2016. “I remember her getting frustrated and trying to push me on the ground, and she also got tired. I mostly remember winning a dominant fight.
“But since then Franchon has proved who she is, with her being a super middleweight champion. I was wanting to fight her when she was undisputed champion at 168 [pounds] and I was undisputed champion at 160, but I think the timing for it is great now. She will have had a great camp and I have had a great camp, so there’ll be no excuses this time. Last time she said the reason she lost was because she had only a two-week training camp. But I’m like, ‘So what? You shouldn’t have shown up then.’”
If you weren’t aware already, let it be known that Claressa Shields, 17-0 (3 KOs), doesn’t suffer fools. She calls herself the “GWOAT” (Greatest Woman of All Time) for a reason and self-applies the term without any hint of irony, unease, or self-consciousness. She is also comfortable, at the age of 30, both with what she has achieved to date – winning world titles as a super welterweight, middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight – and her new heavyweight size. Some, with good reason, will argue that Shields’ ideal fighting weight is lower than where she currently fights, but that doesn’t alter the fact that Shields feels she is at her best right now – as a heavyweight.
“I definitely think I’m the most skilled I’ve ever been in my life, regardless of the weight class,” she said. “People talk about me being at 175 (pounds) – heavyweight – but I’m only there because the girls who were at 160 and 154 and 168 would not fight me. So what am I supposed to do, just sit and wait on them? I went to where the girls were accepting challenges and wanting to fight.
“Honestly, I’m also getting paid the most I’ve got paid in my whole career as a heavyweight. Even though I fought big punchers and dangerous fighters at 160, I didn’t get paid. I only got paid a million dollars for beating up Savannah Marshall. After taxes, it’s not even a million. Then I fought for the undisputed title at 154 and I think I made 350K for that fight. But I had to lose almost 35 pounds to get down to 154.
“Right now, as a heavyweight, I’m having the most lucrative time of my career, and these girls at heavyweight are no joke. I mean, I always speak highly of Danielle Perkins. The girl is strong like a man and can punch. I don’t think there are many women in boxing who could beat her. I don’t think Shadasia Green could beat Danielle Perkins, I don’t think Franchon Crews can beat Danielle Perkins, and I’m just happy I was able to get her out of the way [Shields outpointed Perkins last year]. Honestly, that was a hard test. I think I made it look easy but that’s because of my skills and how great I am.”
With skills like Shields’, and a belief like Shields’, one is not shocked to hear of her readiness to jump back down the divisions should she receive a tantalising enough proposition. Even if boxing happens to be littered with cautionary tales about boxers dropping weight, it is unlikely Shields will ever see herself as vulnerable in the same way. She is built differently, after all. She is the “GWOAT”.
“I won’t find it difficult at all [to move back down],” she said defiantly. “Who’s going to pay me the money? These girls calling me out are all saying, ‘Well, she’s 175, and she walks around at 190.’ That may be the case, but the thing they’re overlooking is that I reigned at those weight classes already and now I am the Canelo [Alvarez]. If y’all want to come up and y’all want to fight me it’s because y’all want the big payday and y’all want to test yourselves. This is not me testing myself against y’all. Everybody already knows I can beat y’all. So this is them testing themselves against me. I think it’s fair when I say to them, ‘Listen, I don’t have to lose all that weight to fight against you. If you want to test your greatness against me, we can meet at a catchweight.’ That’s being fair. Canelo told Terence [Crawford] to come up all the way to 168 and these girls are lucky I’m not telling them to bring their asses up to 168 or 175.
“Listen, whether I fight any of these girls calling me out or not, I’m still going to make millions and sell out arenas. If they want to test out their greatness, they need to get their weight up. I told Mikaela [Mayer, the WBC and WBO super welterweight champion], ‘Hey, at 163, or 165, we can fight.’ But I’m not going all the way down to 160. For what?”
Some will argue of course that Shields going over old ground against Crews-Dezurn – albeit this time over 10 rounds rather than four – is symptomatic of the dead ends at heavyweight. They might also point to Crews-Dezurn losing against Savannah Marshall in 2023 as a tangible reason why this fight with Shields on Sunday could struggle to create much anticipation outside of Detroit, where it takes place. (Shields, let’s not forget, showed the gulf between herself and Marshall in 2022 when travelling to England to outbox the Brit in what was one of the most impressive performances we have so far witnessed in women’s boxing.)
That said, it is just as easy to understand Shields’ perspective on all this when considering how much she has already achieved and how far ahead she is of her rivals. The ones at heavyweight she can quite easily beat, while the ones lighter than her, who campaign in weight classes Shields has already conquered, demand so much of her to come down in weight that any conversation regarding a potential fight should be greeted with the scepticism it warrants. Unfortunately for Shields, you see, there is a certain cachet attached to embroiling her in a war of words. It is, based on her personality, a simple battle to incite and once it is incited it tends to do numbers on social media. That, for many of the women supposedly chasing Shields, is the strategy behind much of what they do when not throwing punches.
“Alycia Baumgardner, that was never real,” said Dmitriy Salita, Shields’ promoter, reflecting on the super-featherweight champion’s past efforts to goad Shields into engaging with her. “That was just an attempt to use her name and get some attention. It was clickbait. I called her manager and promoter and had one “What’s the weather like?” conversation and then never got a call back. This was a couple of years ago. Claressa was willing to go down as low as humanly possible – even a little beyond – to make that fight. But they never had any intention of doing it. Alycia did a lot of talking, but it was never real.”
Shields, on the other hand, is precisely that: real. Like her or not, what you see is what you get with the former two-time Olympic gold medallist. She is as real online as she is in the ring and she makes no apologies for calling out the various things that irk her. In fact, that is all Claressa Shields tends to call out these days. She is, it would seem, above calling out other fighters. That is their purpose in life, not hers.
“Claressa is her own person and she does what she wants,” said Salita. “She is free to express her opinions openly and that’s who she is, right? Do we have conversations about it sometimes? Yes, we do. But Claressa is who she is because of the different energies in her life. The Fighter Inside was a great title for her movie because that’s exactly what it is. From a bird’s-eye view, Claressa is thinking, Listen, I grew up in Flint, Michigan and am a two-time Olympic gold medallist and multi-division world champion. I worked my ass off when people said I couldn’t do it, and you’re disrespecting me? You can understand it from her point of view. Much of the way we act as adults is ingrained in us during our childhood and inequality and the fight for equality and significance has been embedded in her since childhood.”
In many respects, Claressa Shields has changed a lot in the nine years since she last shared a ring with Franchon Crews-Dezurn. In other respects, she has not changed a bit.
