Greg Hardy is now ten fights into a rather unlikely professional fighting career. Or he will be, as of this weekend, when he faces “The Crochet Boss” Maurice Greene at UFC Vegas 12.
Plenty has been said about Hardy’s past, and plenty of people will no doubt be rooting for him to fail. Hardy (6-2, 1NC) continues to push onward in his MMA experiment, however, which has now entered its third year. Fourth, counting his amateur run.
In his past three fights, Hardy has gone the distance three times. Of course, one of those bouts wound up being overturned to a No Contest, due to illegal use of an inhaler between rounds. But Hardy has still managed to find some positive takeaways from his recent performances, especially against Alexander Volkov — a rather lopsided loss in a fight Hardy took on short notice.
“That was a learning experience for sure, man,” Hardy admitted during the UFC Vegas 12 media day this week. “I think I learned how to be a fighter. That was one of my first fights that I had to actually make adjustments and fight, that I had to deal with pain, deal with a broken hand.” All kinds of different things came up in that fight, continued Hardy, forcing him to just pull through adversity, and make adjustments. “And that’s that’s an aspect in fighting that I really had not been introduced to yet. [There] was always a game plan, and it was always executed. A lot of my fights were quick. And that was one of the biggest three round fights, no inhaler, that I’ve had so far.”
The biggest takeaway, summed up Hardy, was learning “the complexities of being an MMA fighter and how to work and persevere on the move.”
Hardy’s progression as a fighter has been slow but steady. Heading into this weekend’s event, he’ll be coming off one of the longer layoffs of his career.
“I’m super sad about not being able to fight back-to-back-to-back,” admitted Hardy. “A couple of things happened, a couple opponents pulled out. But you know, we took that time to just enhance on my overall MMA IQ. And I think we haven’t had a lot of time to build on that, and that time allowed us to add on that, and add a couple of people to the team that I feel like are a necessity.”
Grading himself ahead of his tenth pro fight, Hardy suggested that “if I was a C level fighter before, or even a D level — yeah I would say I was a D level fighter before — I moved up to like the B class. I’ve added some tools and have added some knowledge, to where I’m about to start finishing fights and head hunting, you know, looking for a rank, a number by my name. It’s time.”
We’ll see if he gets a passing grade come Saturday night.
Watch the full UFC Vegas 12 virtual media day press scrum with Greg Hardy above.
