Key occasions
Claressa Shields is within the constructing. The WBC heavyweight champion arrived with particular good friend Papoose, the Brooklyn rapper, about an hour in the past.
Preamble
Good night and welcome to tonight’s undisputed girls’s heavyweight championship bout between Claressa Shields and Danielle Perkins. Shields, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and three-division champion, had no scarcity of profitable gives for this combat, the place she’s going to try and unify all 4 acknowledged world belts in a 3rd completely different weight class. However when given the selection between a marquee venue like Brooklyn’s Barclays Middle and a homecoming, she selected the Michigan metropolis of Flint. “My dream is to combat at Barclays,” Shields mentioned this week. “However the event requires me to need to convey it again house due to the historical past of the combat – the primary girls’s undisputed championship at heavyweight.”
That call is about extra than simply boxing. Shields has lengthy been an emblem of Flint’s combating spirit, a job cemented by her portrayal in The Fireplace Inside, a biopic launched in December. A metropolis as soon as fueled by the auto business, Flint has endured many years of financial decline, depopulation, and, most infamously, the water crisis that started in 2014 when lead contamination plagued its consuming provide. Whereas officers insist the water is now secure and the town is making a comeback, many residents stay cautious, and financial hardships persist.
Flint mayor Sheldon Neeley sees Shields because the embodiment of the town’s grit. “She actually embodies the spirit of the town – coming from disaster to restoration,” he mentioned. “It’s nice that she selected her hometown to convey this nice showcase right here.”
A sellout crowd of 6,000 is predicted tonight at Dort Monetary Middle, the house of the Ontario Hockey League’s Flint Firebirds, whereas 1000’s extra will watch through Dazn. Shields (15-0, 3 KOs) is contemporary off a dominant stoppage victory over Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse for the WBC’s model of the heavyweight title. She’s beforehand unified the 4 belts at each middleweight and light-weight heavyweight.
Her opponent, Brooklyn’s Danielle Perkins (5-0, 2 KOs), a former faculty basketball participant at St John’s College, is relishing the newfound consideration. “I all the time have informed Claressa that I do all the time admire all the things that she’s carried out for boxing,” mentioned Perkins, who hails from Brooklyn. “Her coming as much as the heavyweight division is the perfect factor that would have ever occurred to me in my complete life. Nobody at any level ever cared about this division till Claressa got here up right here.”
Stick with us for round-by-round updates, evaluation and response from Flint, the place Shields and Perkins ought to make their ringwalks in a bit of greater than an hour’s time.
Bryan will probably be right here shortly. Within the meantime right here’s a take a look at yesterday’s weigh-in.
