A senior at Flint Northwestern, Clarissa Shields is a self-aware 17-year-old who will tell you with pride she became a champion by refusing to give up on herself -- and her city -- and by finding solace in a sport once slow to accept women, Jo-Ann Barnas writes in the Free Press.
She told Barnas that she embraced the odds, determined to show through boxing that her hometown could be a place of inspiration, not desolation. That she could rise above the pain of losing friends to gun violence, of losing part of her childhood -- seven years -- when her father was in prison, serving time for breaking and entering.
Yes. Rising above all that.
"I was thinking, 'God knows my heart,' " Shields told Barnas, when asked what she felt on the medal podium Thursday at the Excel Center in London. "This is something that I wanted for a long time, even when I felt that boxing wasn't going right and my life wasn't going right."
