Claressa Shields stood inside the ring in the middle of the O2 Arena in London on Saturday night, her eyes looking around the British crowd who had just watched her assert that she is the greatest female fighter of all time, and she started to get emotional.
All that had happened, both in the ring and in the lead-up to it, may have been hitting her then. The enormity of what she had helped carry to fruition. For years now, since she was an amateur, really, Shields has been the face of women’s boxing in the United States.
Almost every fight she’s been in has had some level of history attached to it, and whether one likes her or dislikes her, she and Katie Taylor have been the standard bearers for women in the sport over the last half-decade — Taylor in Europe and Shields in America.
On Saturday night, in front of a sellout crowd, Shields and her opponent, Savannah Marshall, might have pushed their sport to another level.
“It’s not just a special moment for me,” Shields said. “It’s a special moment for women’s boxing.”
For the second time this year, women’s boxing landed on the biggest stage and outperformed the expectations for a highly anticipated fight. What Taylor and Amanda Serrano did for boxing at New York’s Madison Square Garden back in April — a hyped fight exceeding the most grandiose of hopes — Shields and Marshall did the same in Great Britain.
The Shields-Marshall main event, which Shields won by unanimous decision to become the undisputed middleweight champion for the second time in her career, started out at a rapid pace. Punches came fast from every direction for the majority of the two-minute rounds they…
Source : espn
