Fiery Claressa Shields prods cool Christina Hammer before blockbuster
Claressa Shields leaned in with the all the bluster and braggadocio of an ascendant star fueled by boundless confidence. Christina Hammer sat back with a bemused smile, a picture of calm and self-assurance befitting a nine-year world champion who has heard it all before.
The most important women’s boxing match in a generation or longer is back on, a delicious matchup between two of the world’s best fighters at any weight defined by fascinating contrasts in styles, temperaments and experience levels.
Shields, the two-times Olympic gold medalist from the United States who’s collected three of the major world title belts at 160lbs in the last 250 days, and Hammer, the German émigrée from Kazakhstan who has owned the fourth for nearly a decade, will finally trade hands to decide an undisputed middleweight champion on 13 April at Atlantic City’s Boardwalk Hall. The pair faced off on Tuesday at the Dream Downtown hotel in Manhattan’s posh Chelsea neighborhood to formally announce the 10round unification scrap, which had initially been scheduled for November only to be postponed after Hammer was forced to withdraw because of an undisclosed medical condition that has since been resolved.
“I’m just glad she’s showing up this time,” the American scoffed, one of many provocations lobbed in her opponent’s direction on the day. “I want to make her quit. I don’t want her to just know I’m a good fighter. I want her to know I’m great.”
Shields (8-0, two KOs), the only US boxer to win multiple Olympic golds, is already a two-division world champion in the barely 27 months since her paying debut at super middleweight, armed with an animated invective to match her pressure style inside the ropes. She spent much of Tuesday’s news conference on a high-spirited offensive before a friendly gallery, cavalierly picking away at Hammer’s body of work and deriding the popular Dortmund boxer’s side gig as a lingerie model.
“I don’t have to keep it a secret,” she said. “[Hammer] punches with her chin up in the air, she has a long jab, she does not know how to fight on the inside and she don’t have balance with her legs. Have fun working on that for six weeks.”
Hammer (24-0, 11 KOs), a classy operator who has made 12 successful defenses of the WBO middleweight title since winning it back in 2010, is a deft counter-puncher content to wait for openings and skilled at leveraging an opponent’s aggression to her advantage, a patience mirrored by Tuesday’s phlegmatic rhetorical tack.
“This is a big risk to come from Germany to the US, but I believe the best should fight the best and I did what I had to so that this could happen,” said the 28-year-old veteran, who is coming off a second-round knockout of Elene Sikmashvili in a stay-busy nontitle bout earlier this month in Berlin. “I want to show that strong women can do anything they want. It’s a huge fight and it will inspire a lot of girls by showing they can also earn money in this sport.”
The winner of April’s summit meeting will become only the second undisputed four-belt champion in women’s boxing history after Norway’s Cecilia Braekhus, the welterweight queen widely regarded as the pound-forpound world No 1 today. So rare is the feat in a decentralized sport all but engineered to keep the titles fractured (and the sanctioning fees churning) that only four men have managed it: the current cruiserweight champion Oleksandr Usyk, junior welterweight Terence Crawford and middleweights Bernard Hopkins and Jermain Taylor.
Showtime boxing czar Stephen Espinoza, who said he has thrown the premium cable network’s full promotional heft behind the event, including a production of the glossy All-Access docuseries it typically reserves for payper-view affairs, described it as a “long overdue” showcase for women’s boxing, which for years has been relegated to the margins even as Ronda Rousey lifted women’s mixed martial arts from slagged-off sideshow to headline attraction.
“You see in Mexico and Latin America that women’s boxers are headlining televised cards all the time,” Espinoza said. “In fact, some of the highest ratings on Mexican television come from women’s bouts. The same is true for Europe. So this is one area where the US market unfortunately is behind much of the rest of the world.”
He added: “If you’re not interested in this fight then, candidly, you’re not a boxing fan. This is as good as this sport gets.”
For all the well-documented external factors underpinning women’s boxing’s ongoing struggle for exposure, lack of network support chief among them, there has been no shortage of self-sabotage down the years. On Tuesday, Shields name-checked a pair of surefire blockbusters – Laila Ali v Ann Wolfe and Lucia Rijker v Christy Martin – that died on the vine despite years of chatter and mounting anticipation.
“This is one of those superfights that’s never happened before,” said Shields, whose six-week camp will take place at the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs under trainer John David Jackson, a former twodivision champion best known for his work with light heavyweight titleholder Sergey Kovalev. “We’ve never had one like it in women’s boxing. It’s great to make this happen and us being from two different parts of the world makes this fight even better.”
A self-described “rose that grew from concrete”, the magnetic Shields, who marked time while awaiting Hammer’s recovery by outpointing Scotland’s Hannah Rankin and Belgium’s Femke Hermans for her seventh and eighth professional wins, has been cast on home soil as the clear A-side of the promotion. The 23-year-old from Flint, Michigan – a winner in 77 of her 78 amateur bouts – overcame a transient childhood, poverty and sexual abuse to become the first ever US boxer, male or female, to win consecutive gold medals at the Olympics with a star-making run in London, aged 17, and a compelling encore in Rio, where she earned the women’s half of the Val Barker trophy as the top overall fighter in the competition, an honor not won by an American since Roy Jones Jr at Seoul 1988.
Yet the 5ft 11in Hammer, who said Tuesday she will begin training in Germany before shifting base in March to a more secluded camp in the Austrian mountains near Innsbruck, believes that she is more than capable of pressing her three-inch advantages in height and reach to halt Shields’ dizzying rise and place a stamp on her own legacy as the finest middleweight of her era. She plans on enlisting more male sparring partners than for previous camps with an emphasis on highvolume crowders who can mirror the American’s oppressive in-fighting style.
“She goes forward always, she’s very aggressive,” said Hammer, who last year became the first German boxer to successfully defend a world title in the United States since Max Schmeling in 1931, an experience she said she deliberately ordered to help acclimate for a potential Shields bout. “She wants to push her opponent to the ropes and land some good shots, power shots. You have to be careful and use the thing what she’s doing [against her]. I think she has more emotions than me in this fight. She hates me, I think. We may never have a friendship, but it’s OK.”
When asked whether Shields’ ill will is requited, Hammer betrays another smile.
“I feel nothing,” she said. “I’m emotionless. Because it’s boxing. When I step into the ring, I’m cold as ice and I want to finish this job.”