When I was a recreational golfer (been retired for over 15 years now) I became very familiar with “hitting a provisional” off the tee.
In golf vernacular a provisional is the extra shot you hit following an errant tee shot that may not be findable once you get out there. With as far-ranging as my tee balls flew, I hit a lot of provisionals!
When my friend Wayne contacted me shortly after I’d returned from Event No. 22 – Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo – to see if I might be interested in attending the Claressa Shields-Lani Daniels Ladies Heavyweight Championship Fight at Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena, I hemmed and hawed because I’m not really a fight fan. Then it dawned on me, attending this Detroit card would be like hitting a provisional in the event I either don’t make it to – or my available budget prevents me from getting to – my preferred venues of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas or Madison Square Garden in New York City.
And, to be fair, Little Caesars Arena does have Caesars in its name!
So, I went, I saw, I stayed up really late, and I’ve reaffirmed that live television is simultaneously a great thing for sports and a pox upon the live sport spectating experience.
The Card
I’m a product of the late 1970s and 1980s, so I was a decent boxing fan in my younger years, what with the Sugar Ray Leonard, Robert Duran, Marvin Hagler, and Thomas Hearns quartet duking it out for supremacy in those middle weight classifications. I was also aware enough of Muhammad Ali and some of the other heavyweights of the day – Larry Holmes and Leon Spinks – to hold a conversation. Of course, I also got sucked into the Mike Tyson later that decade when he was kicking arse and taking the names of anyone who dared enter the ring with him.
But I will not pretend to have heard of anyone on the card of this fight night, save one: Claressa Shields.
And to be clear, I’d heard of Shields primarily because she’s from nearby Flint, MI, and gained metro-Detroit notoreity by winning Olympic Gold Medals in both 2012 and 2016; the first American fighter to have ever done so. Shields was also the recent subject of the 2024 docudrama, The Fire Inside, which received a fair amount of hype in southeast lower Michigan.
Line up the other 21 fighters on this 11-bout card and I could not name one let alone confirm they were even boxers.
Here’s who squared off:
- Heavyweights: Demetrius Banks vs. Sardius Simmons
- Light Heavyweights: Devario Hauser vs. Kahmel Makled
- Middleweights: Joshua Flores vs. Jaquan McElroy
- Featherweights: Dominique Griffin vs. Cameran Pankey
- Super Middleweights: Martez McGregor vs. Da’Velle Smith
- WBC Silver Featherweight Title & WBC World Title Eliminator: Licia Boudersa vs. Caroline Veyre
- WBA Super Lightweight World Interim Title: Victoire Piteau vs. Samantha Worthington
- Heavyweights: Robert Simms vs. Pryce Taylor
- Middleweights: Edward Ulloa Diaz vs. Tony Harrison
- Undisputed Heavyweight World Championship: Lani Daniels vs. Claressa Shields
Wayne and I made our way through the gates while the second bout was underway. Also underway was Mother Nature working her magic on my 58-year-old bladder so a quick stop at the men’s room was the first order of business. Consequently (and I was reminded of this all night long) we missed the evening’s only knockout as Makled took care of Hauser in a Technical Knockout in Round 3 of the four scheduled.
(Unbeknownst to me at the time, Makled was a classmate of my son, Jake’s, at Eisenhower High School.)
A Long Night
Wayne had attended a couple of boxing matches in the past, which are a couple more than I had. I once did a feature story on boxer James “Lights Out” Toney when I wrote for the Ann Arbor News, but that was as close as I’d gotten to a boxing match outside of the Rocky franchise.
What neither of us were certain about was the start time. As noted, there were 11 bouts and we knew the doors opened at 4 p.m., but beyond that it was all rather murky (to us at least) and even contradictory based upon the publication referenced.
We targeted our arrival on the early side but we weren’t sure how early we’d be. Turns out it was really early! How early, we quite easily could have attended the Detroit Tigers 6-1 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays down the block, had a post-game beverage, and still been back in time for the main event.
Oh, there was boxing to watch and plenty of up-and-comers on the undercard, but we were there for the Shields-Daniels fight and – based upon the lack of many others in LCA – so were the rest of the fans.
Things moved along swimmingly for the first five fights and then, as it often does, television intervened.
Because DAZN (it’s a real streaming platform, honest) was broadcasting fights beginning at 8 p.m., the proceedings essentially went into the rope-a-dope until the bell tolled eight times. No fighting and plenty of music played during what seemed like an eternity but was probably closer to 45 minutes.
All of which probably would have been fine had the remaining six fights not all gone the distance.
Shields and her entourage – including a drum line! – didn’t begin their march into the arena until 11:46 p.m. and the fight didn’t conclude until a few ticks before 12:30 the next morning.
So, on one hand, boxing matches (and I presume UFC matches as well) could be the best value buy for a sports fan because, conceivably, you’d be watching on-and-off action for over six hours. But on the other hand, I never want to hear a major musical artist ever mention a mandatory curfew again as the reason they need to leave the stage because nearly 16,000 fans just left LCA at oh-my-goodness-it’s-late o’clock.
Of course the cynic in me thinks we could have been out of there at least an hour earlier had television not required the mandatory hold and then had lengthy breaks between each of the six televised fights for unnecessary bloviating by the experts.
A Fistful of Observations from My First Boxing Card
- Despite having witnessed in excess of 70 rounds of boxing, there really weren’t any of those flurries of activity that I recall from so many of those aforementioned fights featuring Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Tyson. I didn’t expect a lot from the heavyweight bouts, but I was certainly thought we’d see more action in some of the lower weight classes.
- With the clarity of the above-the-scoreboard big screens, I caught myself constantly watching the action on the screens rather than what was occurring 25-feet below them. Which makes me wonder if attending a fight night is indeed worth the investment?
- On a card featuring many Michigan-based boxers, neither Wayne nor I were much surprised by the turnout (official attendance was 15,366), but what did surprise us – but maybe shouldn’t have – was how skewed the attendees were to female. While we’ll never know, it certainly felt like a 50/50 split male/female, but it might well have been 2-to-1 in favor of women.
- The boxers’ entrance into the arena is quite the production. As noted above, Shields came in with a full drum line. She also had a Detroit rapper leading the way and enough people in the official (?) entourage to fill a lower-level section it seemed. Tony Harrison, a Detroit-based fighter, had not one but two rappers leading him and he leaned fully into his Detroit status by featuring the Lions’ Honolulu Blue and Silver as his color scheme.
- Bless her heart, but I’m not sure how interested in fighting Claressa Shields’ opponent, Lani Daniels, was. She spent much of the opening rounds doing a fair amount of dancing and staying out of harms way. When she did engage, Daniels seemed a bit overmatched by the self-proclaimed, G.W.O.A.T. (Greatest Woman of All Time), an opponent seven years her junior and five pounds heavier. In the end, the unanimous decision in Shields’ favor was correct and almost seemed pre-ordained.
Clockwise from upper left, Little Caesars Arena was sparsely populated during this undercard bout; home state favorite Claressa Shields strikes a post prior to her bout with Lani Daniels; Shields and Daniels square off; by the time the main event started, LCA was mostly filled with spectators.