“My life to date has revolved around fighting, around my pursuit of striking a man’s jaw with the optimum speed, power and timing to rotate his head, disturb the grid of nerves and blood vessels connecting his brain to his skull and render him temporarily unconscious,” Dan Hardy explains in his gripping book about being an MMA and UFC fighter.
If you ask Hardy, who is now a commentator for the UFC and planning an unlikely comeback in the Octagon, where he was five years ago, he will remember being in a training camp before he “put Duane Ludwig to sleep with a sharp left hook in Vegas. Choose another year and I could be the fighter rising gingerly from the canvas or battling to keep the blood flowing from my head back to my heart as my jugular vein and carotid artery are closed by an arm attempting to choke the life out of me.”
To an outsider UFC fighting can seem an ugly business which ends when a barely conscious man or woman is pinned to the floor of a cage and pummelled into oblivion. Boxing fans witter on instead about the gravitas of our preferred sport. We are helped that the sporting and political landmarks of boxing have been carved out by fighters as resonant as Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, Emile Griffith and Muhammad Ali. Hardy also stresses that an excellent boxing writer in Paul Gibson helped him capture the nuances of his fighting life.
Yet if it was once easy to dismiss Mixed Martial Arts and its brash standard-bearer in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, even blinkered boxing supporters have conceded there are compelling and complex stories within this rival sport. Conor McGregor, UFC’s most outrageously successful fighter, is the obvious example; but Hardy is the more interesting man.
After a few hours with him it is difficult to believe he still catalogues his life in violent markers. Hardy smiles on a sleepy morning in Leicestershire, looking around his home which is a beautiful converted old church. It suits his serene exterior as well as the work of his wife Lacey, an aerialist from Las Vegas, who plans her acrobatics beneath the soaring ceilings.
“Fighting is a very small part of the person I am now,” he concedes. “I enjoyed that role as a fighter with the red mohawk. But it was just one part of me. So it’s amazing how many people say: ‘Oh, you’re not what I expected.’ I guess they remember that crazy guy screaming at the camera and smiling when people were punching him. But I don’t feel defined by fighting now.”
Hardy is immersed in traditional martial arts and, years before he embraced the UFC, he used his grant as a fine art student in Nottingham to travel to China so he could train with Shaolin monks. He has since tried to open his mind by using psychedelics, particularly in ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru, where an Amazonian plant induces altered states of consciousness. It could be mocked as another way of getting high but Hardy sounds reflective and insightful.
“There’s no end to sport,” he says, “because you will never be the overall winner. You can only be successful for a certain period. I look at great writers, musicians and artists who leave something behind that can be appreciated for generations. Whereas all I’d contributed up to that point in my life – fighting – made me feel the best that was going to come out of it was a conversation between two guys over some beers. That wasn’t enough.
“I realised after the first trip to Peru I can chase the [UFC] world championship as much as I want. Even if I grab it and defend it 10 times, at some point somebody else will take my place.”
Hardy compares the brutal side of his character to a “reptile” – and he always wanted to knock out his opponents rather than force a submission.
“That’s because the fighting arena is a place of warfare. I also wanted to get to the top in the UK very quickly so I knew if I could intimidate half the fighters by beating up the other half then that saves a lot of work.”
Hardy has ended up in hospital after a fight; just as some of his opponents have also been taken from an arena in an ambulance. Did he feel ambivalence about fighting, then? “The worst time was when my opponent was in hospital after a fight in Japan. But the onus was on the promotion. They brought me over the day before the weigh-in which meant I didn’t have enough time to cut weight properly. And then in the first round, when he was knocked down twice, the referees should have looked at him because he wasn’t conscious the rest of the fight. But, as fighters, we all know the risks.”
An uncomfortable truth for many boxing fans is that, while UFC looks savage, it could be less damaging. UFC fighters might have blood streaming down their faces but that is less worrying than the invisible trauma done to a boxer’s brain.
“If we’re talking from a medical perspective MMA is probably safer,” Hardy says. “In boxing, if someone goes down, they get a 10 count. They’re already concussed and that concerns me about boxing. MMA does get bloody as we elbow each other. But a lot of it just leaves bruises and stitches.”
As a former No1 welterweight contender, who lost his title shot to the renowned Georges St-Pierre in 2010 and is now the sport’s most articulate analyst, Hardy underlines the reality of defeat in the UFC. “I didn’t suffer from nerves because I appreciated that winning and losing were part of my experience as a martial artist. I love boxing but one of the reasons I struggle with it is because I can’t easily connect with a fighter who doesn’t have a loss on his record.
“Defeats are the most important fights. They’re the ones where you see what a person is made of. A lot of the time you don’t get to see that until a boxer is near the end of his career.
“Every time I stepped out in the UFC I put myself on the line. I was knocked out at the O2 Arena in front of my family and friends. For a fighter that’s humiliating; but it’s more humiliating when a fighter makes excuses. I much prefer a fighter that immediately says: ‘I will learn from this and be better next time.’ That makes me excited about seeing them again.”
What does Hardy think of the proposed boxing match between McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Jr – who might come out of retirement with his perfect 49-0 record? “I don’t think it will happen. I would love it to and would watch it as a fan. But it took five years to get Mayweather-Pacquiao and they’re both boxers. Mayweather is a very smart businessman and he knows there’s no respect from the boxing world in beating Conor McGregor.”
But surely a simple fight, for so much money, would appeal to a businessman like Mayweather? “It would be easy money for Floyd but politics comes into it. Arguments over finances and the division of the purse slow it down.”
Eddie Hearn recently told me a couple of his raw pro boxers would defeat McGregor with ease. “I don’t think that’s fair,” Hardy counters. “It would take a good boxer to beat Conor because of his footwork and speed. There’s undeniable power in his left hand. But the delivery is the chink in his armour as a boxer. He overextends on it and he’s able to do that because of the shape of the octagon. The majority of his finishes are when they’re circling away from his left hand because he forces them to the fence so he can punch across. Mayweather would eat him alive doing that. You saw how he exploited Ricky Hatton when he was in the corner, and just pivoted off that beautiful hook. Conor is wide open for that.
“Conor’s so successful in MMA using boxing skills because he sets it up with his footwork. But if you take away his kicking and put him in a ring with possibly the best defensive boxer ever? And you add another four ounces to the gloves? Conor would have a slim chance.”
McGregor can seem a cartoon character in his bubble of bluster but as Hardy suggests, he is also “a very cerebral fighter. He’ll go back to taekwondo school and work on traditional kicking or he’ll bring in Ido Portal to help his movement. There’s a very experimental and developmental side to Conor which is one of the reasons he’s got so far.”
Yet McGregor’s surreal lifestyle, and the distorting mirror of fame, is not helpful to a fighter. “You’re right. I believe he is actually more a martial artist but being a showman has brought most of his attention. So he’s gravitated towards that now. Conor McGregor is one of the most recognisable people in the world now. If he’s walking down the street, there aren’t many people that wouldn’t want to speak to him. So he’s always in character. It’s a facade.
“But when he lost to Nate Diaz we got a very honest and intimate perspective. His post-fight interview was one of the best pieces I’ve seen because the mask dropped. He admitted he misused his energy and was overzealous. That shows he’s willing to deconstruct his flaws. We’ve seen footage of him in his kitchen in Vegas with his boxing coach and they’re going through drills and you can see the childish excitement on his face when he’s learning something. He’s going: ‘Oh, I got it wrong. Let’s go again!’ That enthusiasm he has for martial arts, for learning, sets him aside.”
Amid his wider intelligence and interests Hardy’s own enthusiasm for MMA remains undiminished. He might no longer define himself by fighting but, aged 34, he is seduced by a possible comeback. Hardy was forced to retire in 2013 after being diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome – which, in layman’s terms, means he in effect has two heartbeats. It was thought, at first, that he risked cardiac arrest if he kept fighting. He has since been cleared to resume his career. But why would such a tranquil man return to raw combat?
“There’s no replacement for it. I’m still trying to understand that drive and to put it to one side – or maybe find another home for it. Even if it’s just one fight I feel I need that closure. It might end in defeat because I’m not going to fight someone easy. There would be no pleasure in that. So there’s something within me that will not be silenced until I have that last great test.”
Hardy smiles as he hears an old fighter’s mantra fall from his own lips. “I think I need to feel it one more time. But maybe that will change. I may start a training camp and think: ‘I don’t want this any more. I’m done with it.’ But until I ask that question I won’t have the answer.”
• Dan Hardy’s Part Reptile: UFC, MMA and Me is available from the Guardian Bookshop
