The Dort Financial Center parking lot in Flint, Michigan was so full that cars were double, and sometimes triple parked behind the television production trucks in the loading dock area of the building. Fans shuffled their way through the icy patches of the lot, and tiptoed through the slush wearing sweaters that said “Team G.W.O.A.T.” or “Claressa Shields: Undisputed.” Though it could have been possible that some of them were Shields’ family members, it’s highly unlikely that all of them were, thought it probably felt to them as though they were.
Everyone in the city seemed to know Shields, or at least talked about her as if they did. Quite often when one goes to a city to cover a boxing match and reveals that detail to the strangers they encounter, the response is quite often somewhere between “who’s fighting?” and “there’s a boxing match here?” Sometimes, it’s even “they still do boxing?” A week prior, I’d been asked if I was in town for the concrete convention or the adult entertainment convention, as if there were no other possible answer. That changes when you’re in Fresno for a Jose Ramirez fight, or Omaha for a Terence Crawford fight. Everyone not only knows a fight is happening, but assumes you must be in town for it too. In Flint, everyone I talked to either already had a ticket, or was a driver disappointed they couldn’t go but excited for the wave of business they’d make on rideshares that night.
When the people of Flint talked about the bout, they referred to Shields by her first name, Claressa, and said it with a kind of familial warmth one might use to convey that you know them.
“Oh yeah, Claressa’s in tough tonight,” one barista said. “That girl she’s fighting is big.”
Considering Shields’ beginnings in Flint, the obstacles so daunting that it warranted a Hollywood biopic about her while she’s still an active competitor, the probability of her having an undisputed heavyweight title fight in the town’s junior hockey arena one day is unfathomable. Shields’ historic Olympic dominance, followed up by an unprecedented ascent through the weight classes collecting undisputed honors justifiably turned her into a superhero-like figure for her city. A city that had to fight simply to survive through industrial jettisoning and literal poison in its water supply had someone that was fighting for them. Shields maintained roots in Flint long after it was a financial necessity for her, and used every big stage she stepped on to celebrate the city, and also draw attention to its plights, with the trademark blue highlighting the water crisis braided into her hair for every fight. Shields’ fights are for them, and they’re an illustration that they can fight and win too, in whatever their fight may be.
Shields’ performance against Danielle Perkins on this night will go down as perhaps the most entertaining of her career. Fighting with a torn ligament in her shoulder that Shields says she suffered a little over a week prior to the bout, she launched overhand rights with regularity at the significantly taller and naturally bigger Perkins. There was a ferocity about Shields’ approach, boosted by the fact that she could physically primarily throw right-handed bombs, that created a frantic and anxious energy in the jam-packed arena. Shields had Perkins badly hurt in the third round, with only the brevity of two minute rounds saving Perkins from a likely knockout.
In the closing moments of the fight, Shields found that same shot, one that landed with such force that Perkins’ eyes rolled back into her head and her body gave out at the waist as she slumped over until her gloves touched the mat. Only the fact that Perkins, a former pro basketball player who survived two near-death car accidents is an athletic and medical marvel, kept her upright and cognizant enough to prevent a buzzer-beater knockout.
In another way, it was the perfect cinematic ending, the Director’s Cut of A Fire Inside, if you will. Shields landing the right hand of her dreams on Perkins, her real-life friend, whose body responded in such a way that she involuntarily bowed to the Queen as the final bell sounded.
But what will be most memorable from that night, what made the performance as exciting as it felt, was what the crowd was feeling and expressing. The floorboards covering the ice surface inside the arena were shaking as Shields entered to mashup of tracks that have become her signature walkout tunes—Jadakiss’ “The Champ Is Here,” “Whoop That Trick” from Hustle and Flow—and a performance by Papoose, her connection with whom has become celebrity gossip page fodder. The crowd kept up a roar that intensified into a deafening eruption every time Shields landed something of significance, and the DJ played his part by both running “Whoop That Trick” back periodically between rounds and unleashing start-a-fight-in-the-club classics like “Knuck if You Buck” by Crime Mob.
Shields and her promoter Dmitriy Salita expressed after the bout that they had their choice of venues for the event, but that Shields wanted to stage the fight in her hometown, and it paid off with a memorable fight atmosphere. The city donned its homemade merch and its finest furs and watched their superhero in real-life, and its reactions were commensurate.
As much as the event was about Flint seeing Shields in her finest hour, it was also about the city itself being seen. Flint has spent the better part of forty years feeling ignored or neglected, by everyone all the way up to government agencies and corporations. But on this night, Flint became the city that the people of Detroit, Grand Rapids and Lansing travelled to for an event, rather than the inverse for a change. More than that, for one Sunday, the week before the Super Bowl, the eyes of a sport’s fanbase were on them and their loved one.