Sports

Would-Be Mugger Fails Miserably After He Unknowingly Targets Female Boxing Champion

By Amanda Thomason August 23, 2019 at 3:13pm

When at least one prospective mugger in Chicago was out at around 10:25 a.m. on Sunday, looking for a victim, he settled on a young brunette woman in workout clothes who was walking along with her phone.

She wasn’t wearing headphones. She wasn’t carrying a purse.

Even her clothes weren’t super-nice — but the phone was enough of a lure, and she became their mark.

Any other 26-year-old woman out for a walk might have been an easy target, but on this particular occasion, the mugger had made a grave miscalculation.

This young woman was Claire Quinn, who has been boxing since 2015, has gone undefeated this year and was named the Golden Gloves champion. She was on her way to the boxing gym.

She now thinks the attack began with a teenager who stopped her to ask where the Nike store was located. She gave him a brief answer, and he walked away. Shortly after, a man crept up behind her and attacked.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” was her first thought, she told the Chicago Tribune. “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 s—.'”

“I was like, ‘Aw, heck no,'” she recalled. “He punched me the one time really hard, and then after that I just kept throwing my right hand into his groin.”

He’d managed to hit her fairly hard in the forehead and push her to the ground, demanding her phone and calling her a derogatory name, but she wasn’t about to let him win. So, she did what she had to.

“I just kept throwing my right hand to his balls,” Quinn told Block Club Chicago. “There’s no way to sugar coat that or put it nicely.”

She reiterated later that she wasn’t about to go down without a fight or be seen as a wimp. She wanted her reaction to become a story that would encourage other women to stand up for themselves.

“A man hits me, I’m firing back,” she said.

Thankfully, the mugger eventually gave up and ran off empty-handed. Quinn ran across the street to where a group of women was, and they welcomed her in.

One of them, who was pregnant, even tried to pick up where Quinn left off and ran after the man — but he soon got in a car and it sped off.

“I don’t know if her maternal instincts kicked in or what. Bless her heart,” Quinn said. “That’s a lot of cardio.”

Quinn canceled the match she was supposed to have on Friday due to suffering a concussion in the scuffle with the mugger. She’s doing well otherwise and is recovering at her parents’ home.

Trinidad Garcia, the boxing gym’s owner and a trainer, is proud of Quinn and thankful she’s doing so well, considering.

“I hope she taught him a lesson and he won’t do something like that again,” Garcia told WXIN.

And based on her stats, she probably did. “My right hand knocks girls out,” Quinn said, referring to the hand she’d used to attack the mugger. “My last four or five fights have been TKOs. It can do some damage.”

But Garcia also stressed the importance of fleeing over fighting when the fight hits the streets.

“You run and you live to run another day,” he told the Tribune. “But that’s not what happened, she was stuck there on the ground and I think it was her natural reaction to go full force. I’m glad she did and thank God she had the tools she needed to succeed — she’s so physically strong.

“It could have been a lot worse.”

Quinn has maintained a sense of humor throughout the ordeal: “I keep joking, ‘Do I still get my trophy?’ I technically won a fight. I kept my phone and my credit card.”

But she has a word of advice to women who may not be as prepared as she was.

“Stop messing around,” she said. “Take a self-defense class.”

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