Late last year former Carolina Panthers and Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Greg Hardy announced his intentions to become a professional mixed martial arts competitor. The move was unwanted by many, due to Hardy’s alleged anti-social off-field conduct.
Hardy missed most of the 2014 season due to an alleged assault incident involving a former girlfriend and a bed covered with firearms. The woman said he told her all the weapons were loaded, and that he threatened to shoot me if I went to the media or reported his assaults to anyone. She estimated between 25 and 30 guns, including AK-47s, automatic-looking weapons, shotguns, rifles, and pistols.
Hardy was found guilty by a North Carolina judge, but following procedure in that state asked for a jury trial. The case was dismissed when the alleged victim did not appear.
Hardy has been training for three months at American Top Team headquarters in Coconut Creek and appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour to discuss what it has been like.
It’s helped me a lot of ways, said Hardy, as transcribed by MMA Fighting. I have a lot of problems as a human being. It’s not something that you do, just walking around saying ‘I’m perfect’ or ‘I’m good.’ Man, I have a lot of different issues that I’m definitely working through and working on. I would say this helps me channel everything. It helps me just come back down to Earth, be humble, because these are machines that I see everyday. I get choked out, punched in the face, and laid out on the mat daily, and that’s not something that a guy my size and my stature with my history has every come across.
It’s a humbling experience, man. Actually, it’s making me really appreciative of everything that I’ve had and everything that I have, and the opportunity that I have to kinda come in and show myself as a guy that is not what everybody says on TV, or, ‘he’s not a monster, he’s not a killer, a women beater,’ this, that and the other. It gives me an opportunity to just come in, be a humble guy, and learn, and honestly just be at the feet of all these champions who walk around like they’re just normal guys … and have the opportunity to make myself better one more time, one last time in sports and life in general.
“So, there were a lot of reasons of why I wasn’t [in the places I needed to be], and I just started in MMA mostly trying to figure it out, because I didn’t know. … You don’t go from being a franchise tag defensive end to being nobody and everything went right. Honestly, that’s how it makes me feel. It feels like I did this to me, and it sucks. I was where I needed to be, I had everything that I wanted, and the normal story is, ‘man, somebody took it away,’ and I don’t have that. I took it away from myself. Now I’m nobody. I’m nowhere. I’m just in the middle of where I put myself.
Like I said, I’m in this position that I’m in, I did it to myself. But at the same time, nobody knows the whole story, so I have to take everything with a grain of salt. Those people that don’t want me there [in MMA], I understand. … I’m not Junior dos Santos, who’s been here and putting in the hard work all these years. I’m a new guy coming into the sport that these guys built, so that’s something that’s going to come along with it. Like I said, [ATT owner] Mr. [Dan] Lambert, I appreciate those guys and [new MMA manager Malki Kawa] letting me come in and have the opportunity to prove that I belong here, that I’m somebody who can actually help the sport and bring a work ethic or something good, whatever I can bring that’s good to it, so that people don’t go into thinking instantly when they hear my name, ‘oh, Greg is a wife beater. Greg is a woman beater.’”
I’m sorry for everything and everybody that I hurt, and coming from a place like that, it makes you grateful for the opportunities that you have, not worried about the negative people that are coming in. They have a right to have that opinion. … I’m just glad that Mr. Lambert and all these guys are giving me the opportunity. I’m grateful to come in and not be nobody, be somebody that kids like my son, like my mom and my sisters and my aunts, these people that I’ve been around my whole life, will be proud of and hopefully I’ll win these people over. And if not, at minimum, I hope that I prove and show everybody that I’m a Greg Hardy that’s worth somebody putting their name besides and behind, and that you can respect, who brings something good to a sport, at minimum.
Hardy flatly denied ever hitting a woman, and reports he has embraced sobriety to the point he said he couldn’t remember when he last took drugs or alcohol. At the direction of his new MMA manager, Hardy begins drug rehabilitation and anger management classes in March. He reports that he will play in a spring football league in April, and would love the opportunity to return to the NFL, in which case he would put his MMA career on hold.
His court case for cocaine charges begins this week.
