Interview
Heather Hardy: ‘I was a world champion and I couldn’t use boxing as my full-time job’
Tess Crain
Former WBO featherweight champion Heather Hardy has won 22 of her 23 professional bouts. Photograph: Tim Knox/The Guardian
The single mom from Brooklyn who became world featherweight champion and one of NYC’s most popular fighters opens up about her feminist roots, the fight for gender equity and life after boxing
Thu 13 May 2021 04.30 EDT
Heather Hardy has experienced it all during her time as a professional fighter. A single mom and feminist who didn’t start boxing until well into her twenties, the Brooklyn native came up through the crucible of New York City’s club scene before finally winning the World Boxing Organization featherweight title in 2018.
Now 39, Hardy is up against a challenge she’s yet to confront in her decade-long career: bouncing back from defeat. Twenty months after suffering her first professional loss and ceding her title to fellow Brooklynite Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden, Hardy will climb into the ring with Montreal’s Jessica Camara in an eight-round lightweight bout at the top of Broadway Boxing’s inaugural Ladies Fight card – a new all-female boxing series streaming on UFC Fight Pass that promoter Lou DiBella has launched to keep veteran contenders busy and elevate up-and-coming prospects.
It’s just the kind of platform that might have made things easier for Hardy during her early years. But her main preoccupation in the days before Friday’s fight is the jump in weight: a two-division leap from her 126lbs comfort zone to the 135lbs realm. “[Camara] is a natural lightweight,” Hardy told the Guardian this week. “I expect that she’s going to be strong.”
The move up for Hardy is born of necessity, the reason all too familiar to some: “During Covid and the shutdowns, I was working full-time and not training. So not only did I have to get back in boxing shape, I had to get back in actual shape and I just thought 126 would kill me.”
Early in 2020, as she strategized her next move after her career-first loss, the world closed down. Then came a phone call from DiBella, the promoter who first spotted Hardy’s potential and signed her only six fights into her pro career as his company’s first female fighter.
“He said, ‘If you need help financially, call me, but do not expect a boxing paycheck in 2020,” Hardy recalls. “Do what you gotta do to put food on the table and pay your bills.’ So I just got out of the gym. I said, ‘No more training. This is regular Heather and survival mode.’”
A year later, having been vaccinated, returned to the gym, and spent the spring preparing for Friday’s bout, Hardy’s fitness and readiness belie the difficult road in her rear view: “I hit my fight weight today. I literally stood on the scale and I cried. I gained nearly 30lbs in Covid. I didn’t think I could do it. I was just like, I’m going to frigging do this. And I did. So standing on that scale today and seeing that 137-point-whatever, it was just the most gratifying feeling.”
If Hardy is not the face of women’s boxing in the United States, she is at least, along with Serrano, its most recognizable face in its biggest city, which remains the sport’s spiritual home. That distinction didn’t come easy. The road to winning the WBO belt in a successful 2018 rematch against Shelly Vincent was paved with years of fights for paltry purses before scattered crowds at BB Kings Blues Club, the Aviator Sports Complex, the since-razed Roseland Ballroom and the many other club venues that pepper the New York City boxing scene.
But for Hardy, boxing has never been just about belts. Her name has become embedded in the discourse around women’s boxing, particularly regarding gender parity. Independent filmmaker Natasha Verma even made her the centerpiece – and namesake – of her 2013 documentary that examined the male-female wage gap in boxing.
Growing up, Hardy felt “strangely drawn” to activists like Billie Jean King and Gloria Steinem: “I always felt like I was born in the wrong era. I should have been marching for women’s rights in the seventies.” So when she started boxing in 2010 before turning pro less than two years later, she found it difficult to ignore the flagrant discrepancies in treatment – both quantifiable and existential – between male and female fighters. Hardy recalls earning $7,500 to defend a WBC international title when the male boxer with similar credentials entering the ring directly after her netted a purse in the high six figures. “I was a world champion and I couldn’t use boxing as my full-time job,” she says.
Heather Hardy, right, suffered the first and only defeat of her professional career to fellow Brooklyn native Amanda Serrano at Madison Square Garden in September 2019. Photograph: Frank Franklin II/AP
Recounting the early days of her career, Hardy describes a disempowering, extortionate landscape. “There’s only room for one at a time. For one Ronda Rousey. One female in each important seat. So no matter how bad that female gets treated, she never wants to speak up because there’s a line of girls waiting for that spot who would gladly take it for less pay or less acknowledgement.”
Not Hardy, however: “As a feminist, as a girl mom, not only did I want to win world titles, but I wanted to make noise.”
Amidst the upward sweep of her career, she realized the implied authority of drawing crowds and filling seats. “People want to see me?” she says. “Hey, maybe I’m not lucky I’m here. Maybe I deserve to be here. And I deserve a little bit more. That kind of gave more power to the things I had to say about what was going on.”
Asked whether she thinks paid a price for her salience and integrity, she hesitates for a beat.
“When you speak out against inequity in any sense, whether it’s gender, race, religion, you’re seen as a whining, complaining female,” Hardy says. “It’s just a stigma that gets attached to you. I’m sure there are tons of people out there who don’t want to deal with me or don’t want to do business with me. But I just don’t care.”
In recent years, boxing has made demonstrable strides toward equity, for which Hardy credits two core factors. First, the introduction of women’s boxing to the Olympics, in 2012, which offered the chance for acclaim on a world stage: “I came from Gleason’s Gym, which has a long line of female champions, female road warriors who traveled around to fight because there was nothing here.”
Second, Hardy cites changes in how we consume content: “Ten years ago, we didn’t have UFC Fight Pass. There were no streaming services. There was no Dazn. If you weren’t at my fight, you couldn’t watch it.”
As in other sports, visibility matters: if fans haven’t seen women fight, they’re less likely to believe women can fight.
Still, while she sees progress, to Hardy, boxing remains “a boys’ game” – particularly in contrast with mixed martial arts, which offers female fighters “more publicity, more money, more recognition, more media attention.” As one of the early female boxers to seek greener pastures (and purses) in the MMA world, Hardy knows firsthand that, between the two combat sports, the industry support for women is “apples and oranges, night and day”.
As she approaches her 40th birthday in January, Hardy knows the obvious question. “People ask me, would you be OK to retire?” Even a fighter who’s headlined cards, performed before sold-out crowds, and won a world title at Madison Square Garden is not impervious to life’s punishing vicissitudes. “If you survived 2020, and you’re not in a mile of debt, you figured it out. I’m convinced there’s nothing I can’t figure out.”
She views Friday’s bout against Camara in the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro as a kind of litmus test for her career.
“My goal is to hit weight, that’s number one,” Hardy says. “Number two, win that fight. Number three, I’m going to Jamaica for a week. I’m going to sit on the beach, I’m going to sip a martini. And I’m going to see if these last three months of my life were worth it. Because the fans, everybody only sees those eight rounds. They don’t see the jogs in the plastic suit. They don’t see shuffling clients. They don’t see homeschooling your 11th-grader, they don’t see SAT scores. That’s the kind of thing that I have to decide. Am I willing to sacrifice my body, my mental health, my everything for what comes next.”
Still, Hardy feels prepared and excited: “I can tell you that my fight camp went unbelievably smooth.” As for Camara, “She could be bigger than me, but I feel really good.”
It’s tough to imagine a fighter with Hardy’s spirit walking away after a comeback. But there’s also the chance we’ll simply see a different side of her. Despite an earned skepticism for the business of boxing, Hardy loves two things about the sport itself.
“I love my role in boxing, which is fighting,” she says. “I don’t know that I’d ever want to really take on any other position outside of fighter – except for maybe commentator because, you know, I do love to talk.”
Given the urgency of her message and passion of her convictions, one can believe that even when she finally hangs up her gloves, Heather Hardy won’t stop speaking up any time soon.
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