Claressa Shields To Defend Unified Women’s Middleweight Titles On December 8 HBO Card
Claressa Shields will not rest after her latest world title fight.
The unified WBA, IBF and WBC women’s middleweight champion will defend her titles on the December 8 HBO Boxing card at the StubHub Center in California against Femke Hermans. It will be Shields’ second fight in four weeks with her latest fight just taking place on November 17.
Shields won a wide unanimous decision victory over Hannah Rankin on the Matchroom Boxing USA card in her last fight. Shields would go on to add the vacant WBC middleweight title to her collection of middleweight titles previously won earlier this year. Shields is currently awaiting fellow middleweight champion Christina Hammer to be medically cleared to fight in 2019 so that the two can face off in a bout to crown the undisputed women’s middleweight champion.
The fight will be the televised opener for the card that will be headlined by another women’s title bout: Cecilia Braekhus defending her undisputed women’s welterweight titles against Aleksandra Magdziak Lopes in what is Braekhus’ second boxing fight televised live on HBO this year.
With the two women’s boxing fights on December 8, it would add up to four women’s boxing matches the network has aired this year alone after not doing so throughout the 45-year history of the sport being on HBO. As of this moment, this will be the final HBO Boxing broadcast as the network announced in late September that it will no longer do regular boxing broadcasts starting in 2019.
The co-main event fight will be a fight between former world champion Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez and Pedro Guevara. It will be Gonzalez’s second fight in 2018 after defeating Moises Fuentes on September 15.
