In this excerpt from T-Rex: Her Fight for Gold, Claressa “T-Rex” Shields and her coach Jason Crutchfield reminisce about how she first began as a boxer. Coach Crutchfield first saw Shields box when she was all of 11 years old. Despite his reservations about girls boxing, Crutchfield took Claressa under his wing when he saw how quickly she excelled in the sport. She’d told him, “When I die I just want someone to say that I’d done something.” For her part, Claressa said she took to boxing because she liked to train, and stuck with it because it made her feel important.