‘Lonely’ Claressa Shields Says Success Caused Family, Friends To Change

Olympic gold medalist Claressa Shields says that when she gained fame as a boxer, she lost loved ones. She particularly called out a relationship gone sour with her sister and the idea that family members and some friends wanted more than she could give them.

“It’s close friends, friends who I grew up with, people I was close to, immediate family, siblings. Some people I never thought I’d be living my life without, and it’s all because I’m successful and all because they don’t know how to accept it. Or they feel I changed, or they expect more out of me,” she told former boxing champ Andre Ward on The Art of Ward podcast recently. “I bought every last one of my siblings a car. Bought my mama a house. My mama two cars. My daddy a car, helped him with his bills. Helped my mama with her bills. Helped my sister take care of her three kids. Her three kids lived with me!”

Shields said despite treating her sister’s daughter like her own and helping her sibling out as much as she felt she could, things fell apart.

“The more you do, the more they don’t like you,” she shared. “I think for me, I overlooked how much my sister stopped liking me. I didn’t know. I never done nothin’ to her. But she’s genuinely just jealous and envious and tries to go on the internet and say all this crazy stuff about me. And it really hurt my feelings, to be honest with you. What I’ve done for her, people won’t do for anybody else. It’s hurtful, but what can you do about it?”

She continued, “I don’t want to get emotional, but me and my sister got the same mama and the same daddy, and we grew up together. You work so hard to make all this money and to have a good life for yourself and the people you want to share it with, they just change on you. And it’s hurtful because people say it’s lonely at the top, but damn. This lonely?”

Shields was visibly hurt by the turn of events in her family life but said she had to move forward and do so with fewer people. She noted that if her sister was upset before, after the release of her biopic The Fire Inside, starring Ryan Destiny, she certainly couldn’t be around for what’s to come.

“You just got to keep on moving though. I got way more fame coming than this. When this movie drop, and all this stuff? I’m about to be on magazine covers and making all type of money. I am not slowing down,” she said. “So if you can’t accept me now and you’re mad because I’m successful and everybody love me and I’m such a good person, there’s nothing I can do. I have to love you from a distance.”

“People don’t want what you give them; they want what you have. And that there you can’t have,” Shields added. “You can’t have what I worked hard for. I can give you a little bit, I can help you, but I can’t give you what I have.”

Shields is an undefeated professional boxer who won two gold medals in middleweight boxing at the Olympic Games in London in 2012 and the Games in Rio in 2016. She’s also done mixed martial arts, winning two matches and losing one.