Flint high schooler boxes into Olympics

FLINT, Mich. (WOOD) - For nearly a century, Berston Fieldhouse has been a haven for Flint's youth. It's a gritty old building where athletes like Glen Rice, Mateen Cleaves, and Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram came to play.

But deep in the bowels of Berston, on the tattered canvas of a makeshift ring, fighters come to work. This is the gym that produced 2004 Olympic bronze medalist Andre Dirrell.

Now it's home to another Olympian, a 17-year-old senior-to-be at Flint Northwestern nicknamed T-Rex.

Claressa Shields.

"I just started to come in and, I don't know, I enjoyed learning," she told 24 Hour News 8. "It wasn't a bad place to be at. No interference when you come here, all the problems went away, you were stress-free for those two hours. Then you walk out there and you're back in the real world."

In Flint, the real world can be a pretty tough place, especially for a kid like Claressa. She was raised in a broken home and her father, Clarence, spent most of her adolescence in prison.

"I started just to make my Dad happy. He said he wasted a bunch of his life, so I said, 'I'll do something.' He told me he used to box. That was the first thing that came to mind. If he would have said a professional track runner, then I would do that, too."

She was 11 when her father first brought her to Berston. That's when she met the club's boxing coach, Jason Crutchfield.

"We have a routine we go through that we teach the kids how to box, and she was doing it real well," Crutchfield said. "She was doing better than the boys. That's when I saw something."

And Claressa saw something in boxing. It gave her life a purpose.

"Ressa was at an age, and a point in her life where she could go this way or that way," he said. "And boxing made her go that way."
    
Boxing "just gave me something to put all my hope into. I don't have to put my hope into a guy or faith into a guy to love me," she said. "I'm down here, and this is where I feel most loved at."

In the Berston gym, the love she gets is tough love. She and Crutchfield have been working together for six years and until a recent trip to China, the only fight she'd ever lost was the occasional verbal knock out from her coach.

"Every once in a while," he said, "you have to push her."

So far, he's pushed the right buttons and Shields has responded. She's already made history as the first US women ever to make an Olympic team, and she'll head to London hoping to make more.

"That'd be real nice to carry, first woman to win a gold medal out of Flint," she said. "And then again, I'm Black. That'd be great."