How boxer Claressa Shields became the main eventClaressa Shields is finally experiencing the fame befitting a two-time Olympic gold medalist. Nic Antaya/Getty ImagesAishwarya KumarFeb 20, 2026, 07:00 AM ETClose
“IT’S A BIT MUCH,” Claressa Shields tells me on a frigid January afternoon. The undefeated and undisputed heavyweight champion of the world is talking about the cameras, microphones and eyeballs that await her at Madison Square Garden. She’s scheduled to make a ringside appearance in a few hours at the Shakur Stevenson-Teofimo Lopez fight with her boyfriend Papoose. To prepare, she has transformed a room in his New Jersey apartment building into her personal salon. Bottles, jars and powders are scattered on a table in front of her.
“So, I know today whatever pictures, videos being taken of me is going to be all over the internet for the next couple of days,” she says.
“Probably a week,” she adds after a pause.
A wry smile forms on her face. She understands the dance.
“My stuff stays viral for days and days and days. I just be like ‘Yo, are you guys not done yet?’ Oh my god,” she says, dramatically rolling her eyes.
“Why is that?” I ask her.
“People just like me, or don’t like me, I don’t know, but they’re obsessed with my lifestyle,” she says. “Me and Pap together — I am a professional world champion; he’s one of the best rappers — it’s fascinating to them and the littlest stuff be viral.”
“I got 19 world championships, along with two Olympic gold medals, along with a great personality, along with a great body, along with a great social media presence, along with a great man,” Shields says. Jerritt Clark/Getty ImagesShields scrolls on her phone and instructs Andi, her makeup artist, on her look for the night. Some shimmer for her eyelids. “Probably use some pink cheeks, too,” Shields says, pulling her bright pink Versace sweatshirt’s hood from her neck. Shields has rinsed her face after shadowboxing at a nearby gym. She has eaten a meal of fish, rice and spinach. She’s considering wearing a bright red dress that’s hanging in Papoose’s apartment upstairs.For more than a decade, Claressa Shields, arguably the greatest women’s boxer of all time, grinded in obscurity. She won an Olympic gold medal in 2012. Then another one in 2016, becoming the first American boxer to win back-to-back golds. So many Olympic champions become American icons. Not Shields.Until now. Last February, at one of her fights, she hard launched her relationship with Papoose, who is going through a divorce with rapper Remy Ma. Ever since, her profile has snowballed into superstardom.Not only does everybody seem to have an opinion about her, but they want to share that opinion. Shields posts on social media. Fans, celebrities, enemies, bots — Joe Schmo to Jake Paul — respond. Most don’t include a heart emoji. It’s not Shields’ nature to back down. She claps back, with a quip, a video, a like, and gives the multitudes something new to respond to. A fresh bout of virality follows. In the five hours I spend with her, Shields goes after the Instagram trolls, the online “liars,” the faceless haters. For Shields, the fight — inside and outside the ring — never stops. Her legacy is at stake.On Feb. 22, 18,000 fans are expected to pack Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena to watch Shields fight archrival Franchón Crews-Dezurn in the main event. Some will root for Shields the fighter, others will ridicule Shields the antagonist. Fourteen years after winning her first Olympic gold medal and nine years after fighting Crews-Dezurn in her pro debut on an undercard in Las Vegas, Shields is getting what she has always wanted. Stratospheric fame. But at what cost?Shields closes her eyes. Andi applies a cream-colored eyeshadow and blends it in. Then she slowly dabs a shimmery gold over Shields’ eyelids. Her eyes pop, the bags beneath them fade.Keeping her eyes closed, Shields tells Andi to do something she has never done before. So much attention will be on her tonight. She wants to capitalize on the moment.She wants to wear red lipstick.Shields believes nothing pokes the trolls better than flashing a sweet smile. Mary Beth Koeth for ESPNWITH THE PRECISION of a surgeon, Andi holds the end of a fake eyelash with a pair of tweezers. She transfers it to her fingers, pinching the sides as she slowly attaches it over Shields’ left eyelid. No good. She removes it and rearranges it. Then she turns to the other eye. The effect is sudden and dramatic. Shields’ eyes look bigger, more almond-shaped. The eyelashes create a winglike effect toward the outside of her eyes.Eyes closed, Shields tells me about the 2012 London Olympics.She was 14 years old when she read the news that women could box at the Olympics in 2012. From then on, that’s all she thought about. She had to run 4 miles from her house in Flint, Michigan, to the gym just to box. Sometimes the shoestrings in her worn-out shoes came undone and flapped around as she ran. She pictured herself holding the Olympic gold medal.She spent hours at the gym beating up boys, and she imagined wrapping the American flag around her shoulders after winning the gold medal match.Her first sparring partner, Darrion Lawson, remembers girls refusing to fight her in Michigan because “they were so scared of getting beat up.” So Shields traveled out of state to find women to fight. By the time 2012 rolled around, even before she got on the plane to London, she knew there was no woman in the world who could beat her. She won her first Olympic gold medal when she was 17 years old.”And then my dream paused,” Shields says.Editor’s Picks
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Andi draws a thick black line on Shields’ eyelid with eyeliner, propelling the line from her top lashes all the way to the edge of her eye and beyond. The eyeliner covers the glue line created by the fake lashes.
Shields speaks faster, words pouring out of her.
“I didn’t get no endorsements and I didn’t get no sponsorships, and I had a gold medal,” Shields says. “So for about a year I was kinda stuck, like, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with my life at this point.”
Andi moves on to filling in her eyebrows, so Shields opens her eyes, narrows them and stares at me.
“I see all these other girls getting covers of magazines and Nike this and Adidas this and Under Armour deals. And I was, like, where’s mine at? I seen girls who didn’t have medals get endorsements, so I just was, like, what the heck?”
Shields received a $25,000 bonus from the United States Olympic Committee for winning gold. She used it to rent a house and buy a car. She heard chatter that she wasn’t getting endorsements because she had gotten lucky with her Olympic gold medal. She decided she would make those people eat their words. She decided she would make the brands who ignored her work extra hard to sign her later. She moved to Florida to train for the Rio Olympics.
When the judges’ decision was revealed after her gold medal match against the Netherlands’ Nouchka Fontijn at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Shields laughed and performed a cartwheel in the ring before running around with the American flag.
Shields became the first American boxer to win back-to-back golds in 2016. Fame came, but it didn’t stay. Alex Livesey/Getty ImagesJust like she predicted, brands reached out. She remembers them all. Powerade. Dick’s Sporting Goods. Under Armour.After shooting a few commercials here and there, she returned to a life of relative normalcy. Fame, it turned out, was fleeting.She set a new goal: Become the first women’s boxer to earn a million dollars. In November 2016, she turned pro.In the years that followed, she fought in various weight classes — from super welterweight (154 pounds) to heavyweight (over 175 pounds) — never once losing in her pro career. But somehow the biggest fight cards went to her peers. Weeks before Netflix revealed the highly anticipated November 2024 fight between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, Shields called former boxer, mentor and Flint native, Andre Dirrell. She couldn’t muster her usual energy that day. She felt dejected.”How long before I get the opportunity to fight in front of millions of people?” she asked him.Dirrell, who always knew what to say to her, picked a passage from a book titled “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and having memorized it, paraphrased it to Shields.”When a man finds that it’s in his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task. He will have to accept the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe,” he told her.”Ress,” he called her by her nickname reserved for people close to her. “Your time will come.”Shields purses her lips. She gets a faraway look on her face, like she’s reconnecting with the emotions from the first decade of her career.Blowing on the brush to remove excess makeup, Andi blends the shimmery eyeshadow in the center of Shields’ eyelids with a dark brown color that she adds to the edges of Shields’ eyebrows. Satisfied with the glimmer effect, Andi moves on to the next big step: contour.Shields and Papoose together has proven to be social media gold. Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesANDI PICKS A BROWN color that’s a couple of shades darker than Shields’ skin tone. Using a brush, she draws a line underneath Shields’ right cheekbone all the way to the edge of her lips. She repeats on the left side. Then, she carefully draws two parallel lines starting from the tip of Shields’ eyebrows to the tip of her nose. Slowly she blends the contour lines seamlessly into the foundation.Shields’ nose appears longer, more pronounced.Papoose walks into the room. “Hey baby,” she says to him.Papoose had told me a few days before that Shields had walked into his world when he thought his “life was over.” She was “full of life” and reminded him of the importance of new beginnings, even after bitter endings. He dove into being a present and loyal partner. “If I gotta give her water, if I gotta hold her bag, if I gotta hold her mitts for her, she needs some sweat wiped off her head — whatever she needs, I want to do it all.”Now, Papoose, who was born Shamele Mackie, sits in the corner and listens to her talk.Papoose serenaded Shields prior to her win by unanimous decision over Danielle Perkins last February. Nic Antaya/Getty ImagesShields is telling me about her last fight. Papoose smiles, like he has heard the story before, but he can’t get enough of it.July 26, 2025, at the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit. It was five months into making things official with Papoose (she’d even gotten a tattoo of his name on the side of her right breast). Some 15,000 people attended that fight, she tells me. Ticket sales alone generated nearly $1.5 million. She won — easily. But that is not what sticks with her.”When I got done fighting, people were crying and screaming and wanting to take pictures,” she says.Shields became a free agent after that fight. Papoose, who is an executive at Wynn Records, facilitated a new deal for her in conjunction with her current promoter, Dmitriy Salita.The result: a guaranteed $8 million multifight deal with a $3 million signing bonus — the largest contract in women’s boxing history. At the news conference, Shields shouted out Papoose, saying it couldn’t have happened without him. She also revealed a new goal: a $50 million payday for a single fight. Just like Floyd Mayweather.Between Andi’s brush strokes, Shields scrolls her Instagram. She rattles off her follower count on each platform. 1.6 million on Instagram. 800,000 across three pages on Facebook — one blue-checkmarked, one personal page and one fan page. 208,000 subscribers on YouTube. Across the platforms, she has amassed more than 3 million followers. She remembers the numbers because she is constantly working to get them up.She calls me over to her side. She opens her post from her news conference in Detroit four days earlier. In it, she’s wearing a bright red jumpsuit, and Papoose is standing behind her, his hands wrapped around her waist. They’re both grinning. She opens the comments section and scrolls. She has restricted comments on the post, so only the positive ones are made visible to her (and everyone else). “idc what nobody thinks & I’m happy she doesn’t either!” one comment reads. Shields pins the comment to the top of the section. “Say wtf yaw want that man is in love,” she reads the comment out loud. “Yes he is,” she exclaims loudly, like she’s having a dialogue with her fan.Andi finishes blending the contour across Shields’ face. She steps back to take a look. The winter sunlight is too bright, so she lowers the shade. Shields’ face looks sharper, more angular. Next, Andi applies a layer of pink lipstick. She asks Shields to look at herself on the camera. Shields opens Snapchat, and unbeknownst to me, starts recording us talking as she pouts and shows off her makeup. She tells me her goal is to post 100 snaps a day.Shields says she’s motivated to finish her career — even if she fights until she’s 40 — undefeated. Mary Beth Koeth for ESPNFourteen years after winning her first Olympic gold medal, she’s the most famous she has ever been. According to Google Trends, U.S. search interest in Shields notably rose in December 2024 when her relationship with Papoose started to bubble. U.S. search interest in Shields hit an all-time high in July 2025, surging nearly 300% higher than it was prior to her connection with Papoose. I ask her why — after all this time — is everyone so invested in her life?Shields, now 30, invokes the names of some of the greatest athletes of all time, athletes who’ve transcended their sports to become almost mythical.”Listen,” she says, pausing. “I seen it happen to Jordan, LeBron, Kobe.””They’re winning, they’re winning, they’re winning, and it gets to the point that when you keep seeing these people win, you’re like, ‘Where’s the excitement?’ Now you want to see them lose all of a sudden. You start picking at little things.”‘We’ve seen her win 19 world championships.’ Now people want to see me struggle, they want to see me lose,” she says.She’s animated now. Gesturing wildly with her hands, she says she watched as an impressionable young woman what Serena Williams went through. And, comparing herself to Williams, she says she’s receiving the same treatment.”Serena Williams was dominating in tournaments, and people were talking about how big her butt was, how strong she is, her lips — people calling her monkey,” she says. “Same stuff happens to me — monkey, ugly, built like a man, your butt’s too big, your back’s too big.”She looks up at Papoose and smiles at him. He looks at her with adoration.”And that’s without the relationship stuff,” she adds.”I got 19 world championships, along with two Olympic gold medals, along with a great personality, along with a great body, along with a great social media presence, along with a great man,” she says, emphasizing the last two words.”My confidence is unshakable. Sometimes that can be intimidating to people.”Shields looks at the Snaps she just posted of her makeup. She doesn’t like her pink lips. She reminds Andi she had asked for red. Andi wipes her lips clean and starts over.What is the point of all of this — the makeup, the flood of social media posts, the trolls — what’s the point? I keep asking her a variation of this question. She closes her mouth on orders from Andi. She can’t have bright red lip color glommed onto her teeth. “That would show up in all the pictures, good god.” Then she touches Andi’s hand. Andi pauses. A serious look appears on Shields’ face.”I am the content,” she says.Shields has been training in Florida for her upcoming rematch with Franchón Crews-Dezurn. Mary Beth Koeth for ESPNHUGGING HER BLACK fur coat around her body, Shields walks out onto the front porch of the apartment complex, her long black braids cascading down her back. She made a last-minute change to her dress. The red one was too dressy, so she has gone with a pink sleeveless outfit. She’s still wearing her Ugg boots. Papoose, wearing a brown jacket, walks alongside her. Their driver, Alvin, pulls up in a black Mercedes-Benz Sprinter. He holds Shields’ fingers as she climbs the stairs. I make my way to the back of the van, but Papoose offers me his seat next to her. “I don’t mind,” he says and sits in the back row.It’s dark inside the Sprinter but for the purple star lights covering the roof. They reflect off Shields’ face, making her cheeks pinker and her lips redder.We’re talking about fame. She walks me through the first weeks of getting pummeled with comments on social media. A year ago, she made her relationship with Papoose public. They’d been dating for a few months, and it felt like the natural next step. The first video to go viral: Papoose serenading her with his famous Busta Rhymes 2006 remix “Touch It” as she walks into the ring in her sequined black and gold outfit before her fight against Danielle Perkins. A cheesing Shields bops to the rap, mouthing the lyrics as she takes in the crowd of nearly 6,000 people in Flint.For years, Shields had waited for her due. Now, suddenly, and all at once, the world noticed her and bestowed her with riches she had dreamed of. But, along with the riches also came ceaseless and soul-sucking negativity. Overnight, her relationship became everyone’s relationship. She wasn’t prepared for the hatred.”You get in a relationship, everyone wanna be in your business,” Shields says. “I’ve never experienced that because I’ve never dated celebrities — so getting with him, it was like…” She makes a whooshing sound, propelling her arm over her head to indicate how crazy her life suddenly became.Shields narrows her eyebrows. She looks irritated. All she sees are lies, lies, lies when she goes on the internet, she says. Strangers creating a narrative of their relationship.”Only me and him knew the timeline,” she says, her voice raising.In rapid fire, she walks me through the pages of her romance, as though she’s trying to convince me. Or maybe what she’s trying to do is convince social media trolls through me. Or maybe she doesn’t want the lies to become the truth, so she keeps repeating what happened to remind herself — and everyone — of the truth.By the time they met in July 2024 at a Stevenson fight in Newark, New Jersey, Papoose and Remy Ma had already separated, Shields says. Shields invited him to her fight in Detroit at the end of the month. After, they began texting each other, they sometimes sent each other poems. (“Hell no!” she says when I ask her to show me some.) Some of it was romantic, but some was about her childhood, her difficult upbringing, and how she’d made it “brick by brick.” Shields is no rapper, but Papoose thought her poems were so rhythmic, so poignant.Shields pauses and shakes her head.”As far as us being together, like, ‘Oh, he was with me and his ex at the same time,’ never f—ing existed. 100% not true, but this is what they were trying to portray out there,” she says.Papoose has brought a heightened interest to Shields’ career. “You get in a relationship, everyone wanna be in your business,” Shields says. Paras Griffin/Getty ImagesNotifications poured from all directions. People who didn’t know her spewed hatred at her. Fans revered Papoose and Remy Ma’s almost two-decadelong love story, which included Papoose staying by her side while Remy Ma spent six years in jail for shooting a friend outside a nightclub. Their journey as a married couple and then parents was captured for the world to see in the reality TV show “Love & Hip Hop: New York,” which aired on VH1 from 2011 to 2020.So when their marriage crumbled and Shields’ relationship with Papoose blossomed, fans could not come to terms with it. Shields became their punching bag. When Remy Ma took her fight with Papoose to social media, posting screenshots of texts accusing Papoose of cheating on her with Shields, it gave people permission to opine. They called Shields a home wrecker. They dissected every video, every photo that she or Papoose posted. They called her ugly. Papoose is 17 years Shields’ senior and has a daughter who is almost her age. They called her naive. If Papoose smiled at her too hard, they called his love for her fake. If he didn’t smile enough, they mentioned he was unhappy. When he proclaimed his love for her, they called him a liar.Shields didn’t shy away. She posted on X that she’s ready to fight — like literally fight — Remy. Once, she called a fan who called her ugly, “fat.” Sometimes, she made videos, asking people why they come to her social media platforms to spread negativity when they say they don’t like her. “Why are y’all so pressed?” Sometimes, she reposted Papoose’s posts of her and trolled the trolls. “All the hate in the DMs because my man posted me for the 20th time.” Sometimes, she egged them on. “When I get pregnant, y’all gonna be crying in the car punching the steering wheel.” Sometimes, she sounded genuinely perplexed. “If I got you blocked on Instagram, twitter, Snapchat and Facebook, what are you doing still making videos and rumors about me.” she wrote. “STALKERS!!!!!” she called them.People called her a child, and questioned why she wouldn’t take the high road and ignore the haters, the rage baiters. She went toe-to-toe with other celebrities, including 50 Cent, Jake Paul, Ryan Garcia and Angel Reese.I ask her how often she feels like she can’t win with these internet trolls.”Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” she responds promptly.”I can switch up right now,” she says, scrunching her shoulders and ducking her head. “When somebody call me ugly, I can be like…”Her voice goes soft. High-pitched. She draws out the words, speaking slowly. For the first time since we met earlier today, she looks at the floor instead of making eye contact with me.”Oh bless their heart. I’m just gonna pray for them. I am so sorry you feel that way about me.”She sits up taller. Her voice gets low and harsh.”Everybody will think I got f—ing cloned, and they’d be like, ‘Where the hell is the champ?'” she says, her words getting louder and louder. She smirks.”Not it. Never gonna happen. Not me.””My confidence is unshakable,” says Shields, who refers to herself as the GWOAT (greatest woman of all time). “Sometimes that can be intimidating to people.” AP Photo/Pamela SmithI ask her how she would have handled this level of fame a decade ago.”I’d be in jail,” she says and lets out a cackle. “If they disrespected me back then, they would have got their ass whooped.”Now, she says, she’s more measured. She ignores 100 comments before one catches her eye that she doesn’t want to — or can’t seem to — ignore. And, she asks, why should she?She gets somber, looking out the window. She hugs her coat tighter.”I’ve always been a person who’s defended myself against anything and everybody, you know?” she says.Shields takes a break — if only for a moment — during a February training session in Florida. Mary Beth Koeth for ESPNTHE SPRINTER STOPS at the entrance to a mall near Madison Square Garden so Papoose can get a hat. I ask Shields about her upcoming fight on Feb. 22 at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit.I ask how she pushes herself — and gets better — when she has never lost. I had asked the same question to John David Jackson, her coach of eight years, a few days before. It means, they both mentioned, when she walks away from the sport, she can say that she’s undefeated. Very few boxers — Floyd Mayweather is one — can say that. And she wants that, bad. “Once you lose, the aura of invincibility is gone,” Jackson told me.”You have fans, you have enemies in the sport that dislike that she’s never lost,” Jackson mentioned. “That alone motivates her.”Back in the Sprinter, she tells me how she talks to herself. In second person.”How can you beat your own past self?” she says, her eyebrows scrunched up. “You’re 19-time world champion in 10 years, so if you have eight more years left, can you be 40-time world champion?”She looks amped.”Hell, we might go on ’til we’re 40,” she says, smiling.She looks down at her phone. I ask her how she has the time to become so many different versions of herself.She reminds me that she is the content. That she is the main event. When people buy tickets to her fight, they’re coming to watch her. Controversy amps people up. Trash talk sells.”If you go on my Instagram, Facebook, all you see is pictures of me smiling. They hate that,” she says, a smile creeping across her face. “They make up all these lies, all these stories and then you post a picture, you’re smiling and you’re dancing, they can’t stand it.”Millions of people show up every day to watch her videos — of her eating, chatting, training, getting her makeup done. A lot of the comments focus on Papoose. She ends up getting 60 million views a day on her Instagram, she tells me. On Snapchat, her videos generated $20,000 in income in January, she says.So, in a way, her relationship with Papoose is serving an important purpose: eyeballs on her boxing career. Tickets for her fight are almost sold out, she tells me. For her February 2025 fight against Perkins, when she introduced Papoose as her partner, nearly 6,000 people attended. In July, when she revealed she was fighting in a bigger arena, that number almost tripled to 15,369. This time, she is on course to hit 18,000, her biggest audience ever. She wants a spectacle.It’s hard to tell if she has contended with the idea that after being the best boxer of her generation, a relationship with a rapper is what has propelled her fame — or her infamy. What she keeps returning to is this: Without her astounding career and her fiery personality, there would be nothing for people to dissect. In her mind, it’s all connected. As she keeps saying: she has two Olympic gold medals, 19 world championships, a great body, a great personality and a great man.”At the end of the day, even though you’re showing hateful behavior, you must in some way, shape or form love me because you keep making videos about me, you keep following me,” she says.I ask her if she feels different today compared to herself a year ago.She says she’s still the same person. But she meditates a lot more, prays a lot more. She feels the gaze of hundreds of young girls, she says. She gets messages from young boxers who call her their inspiration. Recently, British boxer Caroline Dubois called Shields her role model.”I think I got a lot nicer,” she says.She looks up at the purple stars on the roof of the Sprinter.Because she knows herself so well, she says, and knows her relationship with God, negativity lands softer on her today than it did a year ago.She’s always asking WWJD, she says.I look at her quizzically.”What would Jesus do?”She nods.We’re parting ways at the mall. I thank her for spending the day with me.She leans her head back in her seat, her face obscured by shadows. It’s hard to tell if she has any makeup on at all.”So, you’ve talked to me all day today, you’ve talked to people who are close to me,” she says.”What is it you feel like you know about me?”She catches me by surprise. I tell her I understand her motivations, her relationship to fame.”What made you ask that question?” I ask her.”When I read the article, I want to have a sense for what you will say about me,” she says.It’s all a mirage, I think as Alvin closes the door behind me. With red lips and a bronze phone under the purple lights, Claressa Shields rides to the Garden. The only fight she can’t win awaits.
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