The death and re-birth of Dan Hardy, Part 1
I was really up against it in those three fights and it was just a bad run. I wasn’t at…
I was really up against it in those three fights and it was just a bad run. I wasn’t at my best. It was just a really bad phase that I was going through in my career, and a lot of the times in this sport, you feel like a product, you don’t feel like a person anymore. You feel like you’re a commodity to be traded and that’s a very depressing feeling. Because a lot of people don’t get to know you as a person, they just see you as you are on TV and think you’re a product, Hardy stated.Sometimes I think it would be kind of nice to work nine to five cause then I know when it’s Friday I’ve got a couple of days to just chill out and be me, do my thing, but you don’t have that luxury in this sport.
Hardy got into MMA because at the heart of it all he wanted to be a fighter and he loved martial arts. When it stopped being fun, when he stopped enjoying himself on daily basis, the Dan Hardy that grew up pretending he was one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles died. What was left was a shell of the man who beat guys like Mike Swick and Marcus Davis in the UFC.
Martial arts for me, it’s been my core focus since I was a kid, said Hardy. And to find myself in this situation where I was doing what I thought I was going to love as an adult, just being able to train full time, to becoming frustrated and not wanting to be anywhere near it, it was upsetting for me because obviously martial arts is very important to me. I’ve made a lot of good friends and I’ve had a lot of good experiences through martial arts, but there’s a lot of negativity that comes with it as well when it becomes a business.
The business was sinking and Dan Hardy was going down with the ship.