by David P. Greisman

Claressa Shields found solace in a boxing gym for the same reason so many others have. It was a positive outlet, an escape from negative influences, a place where hard work truly does pay off in a city where the American Dream rarely becomes reality.

She was a preteen whose father was absent, away in prison since before she could remember, reemerging by the time she was nine. She was a child growing up in a city that was withering: Flint, Michigan. She lived in a dilapidated house and a broken home.

The gym was her outlet, an outlet that’s given her power. What she’s done since then has been electric.

In 2012, six years after she first stepped foot into the Berston Field House, she traveled to London to compete in the Olympics, following the path of three men who had trained in her gym before — Chris Byrd, Andre Dirrell and Anthony Dirrell. Byrd won silver in 1992. Andre Dirrell won bronze in 2004.

Shields won gold.

Gold was long the standard every four years for the United States Boxing Team. Since 1952, at least one American man stood atop the podium in 12 of the 15 Olympics in which the country participated. There were five gold medalists in 1952, two in 1956, three in 1960, one in 1964, two in 1968, one in 1972, five in 1976, nine in 1984, three in 1988, one in 1992, one in 1996 and one in 2004.

The U.S. boycotted the 1980 Games. No one won gold for the country in 2000, though two picked up silver medals and two more won bronze. No other country has won more gold medals in the modern Olympic era. No country has won more silver or bronze, either, than the United States. In 2008, however, only one American man even took home a medal: Deontay Wilder, who earned a bronze at heavyweight. In 2012, not a single American man earned a spot on the podium.

Two women did, though. In the first Olympics with female boxing, Marlen Esparza won bronze while Shields left London with the gold.

“T-Rex: Her Fight For Gold” chronicles Shields’ journey in the two years leading up to her trip to the Olympics and the months after her triumph. It will premiere on PBS on Tuesday, Aug. 2, just days before Shields, whose nickname is T-Rex, takes to the ring once more, this time at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

She will be the favorite going into the tournament in Brazil. But it wasn’t an easy route going to London, nor did it become easy, even after her greatest accomplishment.

Boxing loves an underdog story. “Rocky” resonated because it followed an everyday hero overcoming the odds. The movie’s archetype became a cliché, but it represented a wider truth.

So many of the stars in this sport come from hardscrabble backgrounds, living in places and situations where the American Dream seems out of reach. The documentary gives glimpses at some of Shields’ struggles.

Her younger sister mentions discomfort with their mother’s boyfriend and has an angry exchange with him. Her father is an ex-con whom she didn’t really know for the first half of her life. Her mother and stepmother don’t get along. There are disagreements with her trainer, especially when he disapproves of her relationship with Andreal “Rell” Holmes, a young man who boxes in the same gym. She wants more money to support her family. She lives in a place where other teenage girls often get pregnant. She used to want little more than a large family of her own until she took to boxing.

“Girls get easily pregnant in Flint,” she says in the film. “My goal before boxing was to have 10 kids before I was 26. Without boxing, I’m not going to say where I’d be at.”

But there’s not enough depth, and the documentary also fails to include details of several serious storylines.

“She had no bed growing up and often slept on the floor. ... There was little or no food in her home,” wrote Kevin Iole for Yahoo! Sports last year. “And then there were the men. For the longest time, Shields couldn't bear to think of all those men who'd trekked through her home and done despicable things. She'd pushed it to the recesses of her memory, determined never to talk about what had occurred.”

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Shields didn’t really speak until the age of 5, and even then she stuttered. Her mother likely took their food stamps and used them to buy drugs, according to the article.

“But mostly what Shields remembers from those early years is the men,” Iole wrote. “Her mother had a lot of acquaintances, she said, and every time she turned around, there was another one, it seemed. Three of them, she said, raped and sexually molested her. … Her youngest brother's father sexually molested her every day after school. She knew it wasn't right, but didn't know how to make it stop. There was no one to confide in, no one to make it all right.”

These are horrifying revelations, uncomfortable ones that the movie’s subject might not have wanted to confront on-camera but later chose to speak about with Iole. They also are stories that would help explain why Shields went to the gym in the first place after her father talked about boxing with her, and why she would be the only one working out on Fridays when no one else showed up.

“I remember her coming down the first day. She was 11 years old,” trainer Jason Crutchfield recalls in the film. “She was catching on real quick. I just took her under my wing from there. I would never imagine that she would come this far. I didn’t agree with female boxing at the time.”

Crutchfield briefly fought as a pro, going 7-1-1 between 1990 and 1993, according to BoxRec. The film shows photos of a young Crutchfield with late, great trainer Emanuel Steward in his corner. Crutchfield quit when his father and grandmother fell ill. He’s shown repairing utility lines in the movie. He’s not paid to train, he says, but is content with passing along his knowledge and seeing what it may inspire.

““A champion. A coach always wants a champion,” he says. “That’s why we coach. We want to help the kids and stuff like that, but the first thing is to have a good fighter. You want to put your time into somebody who might catch on someday and really do it. I think I got one. I just never thought it was gonna be a girl.”

He also became a father figure to Shields, who ultimately moved into his home. He’s seen reviewing her report card. Shields had a 3.2 GPA but had a “D” in one class and a number of occasions on which she was tardy for or absent from class.

Their relationship was as strained at times as any between a parent and child. He has a rule between fighters dating in his gym, but Shields felt as if she must follow her heart when it came to a positive presence in her life. Shields traveled to China for a tournament that was instrumental for qualifying for the 2008 Olympics, lost a decision and then was upset at Crutchfield for not being there. Shields made it into the Olympics anyway when the woman who beat her also qualified. But as U.S. Boxing took more of a role in her training, Crutchfield became marginalized and the growing distance between him and Shields is evident.

And then suddenly she is in London. Shields has an opening-round bye. We see a close win in the quarterfinal round, and soon we see her fighting for the gold medal. There is little tension and far too little shown of her preparation, except for a scene over lunch in which Crutchfield is critical of her quarterfinal performance and Shields wants little of it. We have a hero and her journey, but not the full journey that would make her victory seem even sweeter, make the destination all the more worthwhile.

Shields returns to a warm welcome, to appearances on local and national television shows, to people wanting money and her mother bringing Shields to help pay for overdue bills. Shields is still a teenager in the movie. Before the Olympics, she was making water balloons and eating birthday cake. Afterward, she’s back in the classroom, then at prom and then at graduation.

But there’s also discussions of and frustrations over the need for sponsorships and endorsements, which are going to gold medalists in the more popular Olympic sports of swimming and women’s gymnastics.

“I won a gold medal. There’s no way in the world that I shouldn’t get paid to stay amateur,” she said.

Crutchfield again wants her relationship with Holmes to end. Shields moved out of Crutchfield’s home. We don’t know how she made it happen. We just know that it did. Crutchfield says he understands. A cursory search online shows that they are no longer working together either.

“I would let Jason control everything,” Shields told ESPN’s women-centric website earlier this year. “He's my manager, boss and coach and my dad. When he got upset he had the power to take me out of the gym, the power to be mean to me at the house and then the power to not even do business. I was like, 'He controls too much of my life.' I tried talking to him many times, but he wouldn't tell me what the problem was.”

(Crutchfield nevertheless joined Shields when they spoke to Vice Sports after the documentary premiered at a film festival last year.)

Shields was for a brief time a mother herself, though not in the way she once dreamed. A cousin became pregnant with a third child, a baby she didn’t want to carry to term. Shields offered to adopt the little girl, only for the cousin to take the child back later in 2015, according to USA Today.

“Now I’m able to focus more on training,” Shields told USA Today. “I still think about the baby all the time but it was like, maybe it wasn’t time for me to have a child.”

Not when there’s so much on the line, when there’s still hope for that American Dream to come true for her as it did for so many others in her sport.

For decades, when boxing in the United States was more popular, success in the Olympics led to a spotlight in the pros. That spotlight isn’t as bright as it once was, but there’s at least money and opportunities for the male fighters. While female mixed martial arts is increasingly popular in America and female boxers headline shows internationally, that’s not yet available for the likes of Claressa Shields.

Instead, she’s a 21-year-old who remains amateur for now, who will be a hero returning and hoping to repeat in Rio, but who may very well once again be in competition for attention with American athletes from the glamour sports. This documentary is a nice feature, but it’s not going to make up for whatever channel and time slot to which female boxing will be consigned.

And so Shields’ fight continues. She’s already been through a lot. She’s accomplished a lot in spite of it — and also because of it.

She should have more to show for it. Even if Claressa Shields doesn’t add another heavy medal around her neck, she deserves to have some weight lifted off her shoulders.

“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com