A woman was minding her own business while walking down the street when she was abruptly attacked by a mugger, who probably thought the 152-pound woman was an easy target. He found out the “hard way” that he had picked the wrong woman—because she was an undefeated “Golden Gloves” boxer.
Claire Quinn, who won Chicago’s Golden Gloves boxing tournament by unanimous decision in her 152-pound weight class, said she was walking through the Bucktown neighborhood of the Windy City when a man sucker-punched her in the head and demanded her cell phone.
Quinn’s ferocious boxing instinct took over, she said, and she responded with a barrage of blows to the man’s groin before he realized he was no match for the 6-0 heavy right-hander. “I just kept throwing my right hand to his balls,” Quinn told reporters. “There’s no way to sugarcoat that or put it nicely.”
Claire Quinn stated that the attack occurred when she was on her way to Unanimous Boxing Gym. When a teenage boy asked her for directions to a nearby Nike store, she replied that it was only a block away. Quinn claimed that a second individual approached her from behind and shoved her to the ground before punching her in the head and shouting, “Gimme your phone, b*tch!”
Quinn instantly cocked her right arm and let loose, peppering the second suspect’s groin with rapid-fire blows while holding her phone in her left hand. “A man hits me, I’m firing back,” she said. “If I’m gonna be defined, it’s going to be as the girl who punched the guy in the d*ck. It’s not gonna be, ‘Oh, she was a wimp. She was a victim of a crime.'”
Unsurprisingly, the assailant quickly fled, leaving 152-pound Claire Quinn with a mild concussion and some bruising. “My right hand knocks girls out,” she said. “My last four or five fights have been TKOs (technical knockouts). It can do some damage.”
A pregnant woman who witnessed the attack hurried toward Quinn’s attacker and watched him leap into a green car, likely a Honda Civic, she recounted. “I don’t know if her maternal instincts kicked in or what,” Quinn said. “Bless her heart. That’s a lot of cardio.”
Claire Quinn does not believe she made herself a clear target. She wasn’t carrying a purse, wearing headphones, or dressed up. “I don’t wear my nice workout clothes on sparring days because I don’t want to get blood on Lululemons,” she joked. Quinn noted that the muggers presumably assumed she would be simple to rob because she appeared “Midwestern nice” and answered the teen’s inquiry about going to the Nike store about a block away.
“One of the reasons I love Chicago is, if you are lost, someone will help you,” she said. “I’m not a mean person but after this—literally, all I said to them is, ‘It’s a block away,’ and with that simple statement, they decided I was their target. That’s something I’m going to remember,” the female fighter declared. “I hate it, but I feel like from now on I’m not going to respond, I’m just going to keep walking.”
Claire Quinn stated that it never occurred to her to hand over her iPhone. Her first thought was, “You’ve got to be kidding me. A man literally thought he could assault me and get away with it. I was angry and wanted to make him regret picking/targeting me. A motto I live by: ‘Do no harm but take no sh*t!”
The female boxer’s coach also commented on her ordeal. “It takes a special kind of person to be able to do what she did,” Trinidad Garcia said. “I know many fighters, mostly men, that wouldn’t have been able to do close to what she did. She went all out and I’m very, very proud of her.”
