Greg Hardy’s NFL career seems to be finally, mercifully over. Some combination of his history of unrepentant violence toward women, chronic lateness and disobedience in the locker room, and his other run-ins with the law has finally outweighed his prodigious talent on the football team and made him untouchable in free agency.
It seems like Hardy has seen the writing on the wall, because he has announced that he’s turning his attention toward becoming an MMA fighter.
In a statement provided to MMAFighting.com, the 28-year-old Hardy said, “I’m very focused and excited to start my MMA career. I’m going to do this the right way, I can assure you of that.”
We assume that when Hardy says “the right way,” he means he doesn’t intend his foray into fighting to be a stunt fight or two, but a sustained career. Hardy was obviously an excellent athlete in the NFL, but at 6-foot-4, his last listed weight in the NFL was 274 pounds, which would put him in the super heavyweight class. Obviously, there are different requirements from the bodies of defensive lineman and fighters, but we’d imagine that Hardy has some serious weight to cut before he could ever step inside a ring — and that’s before we get into whether he’d be any good at fighting.
The fighting disciplines sadly have an extensive history of promoting fighters with domestic violence histories, so Hardy wouldn’t exactly be out of place. If he can actually show some talent, we have no doubt he’d be able to find fights.
(Via MMAFighting.com)
