ELEVEN YEARS BEFORE it was requisitioned as an armed merchant cruiser and sunk by a German submarine west of the Outer Hebrides, the T.S.S. Caledonia departed Glasgow for America’s east coast via Moville, Co. Donegal.
A pit-stop in The Forgotten County was all the more poignant for Heather Hardy’s great-grandmother, for whom Ireland would never become the forgotten country despite her emigration – first to Scotland with her husband, a boatsman – then Brooklyn, New York.
Hardy’s roots can be traced back to “a few miles outside Dublin.” They meander through Mountjoy Street in the Irish capital, where her grandmother grew up alongside 13 siblings some years before the family’s transatlantic crossing in 1928.
“They were across back and forth from Dublin to Scotland,” Hardy says of her mother’s side. “My great-grandfather was a sailor, so my grandmother would have to take the kids – her siblings – back and forth. I can’t think of the name of the town in Scotland, but it was right on the water.
“My family came to Brooklyn, and my momma lived in the same house that my grandmother lived in. The whole community where I’m from is third-generation Irish. People came over from Dublin and that side, and all settled in this small community in Brooklyn.”
“I thought New York was just a part of Ireland when I was a little girl,” laughs Hardy. “I grew up thinking that New York was only Irish people, because we were all part of this little community in Gerritsen Beach. To me, everyone in New York was Irish!
We’re all very proud of where we come from. I’ve never been to Ireland, though. It’s definitely my dream to get over there. My momma just went back last year for the first time. I’m sure I’ll get over there, but wouldn’t it be a dream to get over there for a fight?
“But I guess I’d be going to represent America over there! I wouldn’t really be seen as an Irish girl, right?”
Al Bello
Al Bello
Hardy comes from a family of strong female leads: her great-grandmother, having traversed the Atlantic, became the first volunteer firefighter in the family’s Brooklyn neighbourhood of Gerritsen Beach – a tight-knit, Irish-dominated fishing enclave east of Sheepshead. Her grandmother cared for 13 siblings and was the first female gym teacher in the same neighbourhood’s local Catholic school.
Her mother always told her that ‘no one on the street is going to beat you like your momma’. It was a fairly shrewd observation by all accounts.
And it’s just as well she’s the continuation of a teak-tough lineage, for Hardy herself has endured suffering outside of the boxing ring which dwarves the damage she’s shipped within it.
The woman is a fighter.
Hardy is a divorced single mother who, at one juncture not long ago, was working six jobs – including selling lights, delivering books and running websites – in order to support not only herself and her daughter, Annie, but her sister and nephew with whom she shared an apartment.
That was subsequently obliterated by an electrical fire. Their living arrangement had been makeshift – no insurance money – and so Hardy and her sister were forced to uproot their kids and move back in with their own parents.
Enter Hurricane Sandy: in October 2012, five days after Hardy’s second professional fight, her folks’ home was torn asunder by the 185km/h winds which ravaged America’s east coast.
Her parents spent the bones of a year living in their local church rectory.
Hurricane Sandy did almost $70bn worth of damage to the east coast of America Palm Beach Post
Palm Beach Post
Having caught the fighting bug a couple of years prior, Hardy took up temporary residence at Brooklyn’s famed Gleason’s Gym in which she trained, but it was no home for the seven-year-old Annie, who was sent to stay with cousins some 80 kilometres away in Long Island.
It was Hardy’s own childhood which bore her greatest trauma, though – one incomparable to the personal strife which has blighted the odd year since.
At the age of 12, she was raped by a 29-year-old man.
Because Hardy was smoking weed with him at the time (she maintains the man in question laced her cannabis with something more sinister), she told nobody of the attack for years. Plagued by a fallacious guilt, she instead harboured the pain alone into adulthood before eventually informing her now-ex-husband and, just over six years ago, her family.
Her abuser still walks the streets – her streets, in Gerritsen Beach – over two decades later, and she has spotted him on several occasions. The sight of him still terrifies her, and while Hardy describes rape as ‘a life sentence’, she has long since overcome the gnawing agony of self-blame: the burden should never have been hers. It will always be his.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Boxing’s speedbumps are infinitesimal by comparison, but even within the fistic realm Hardy’s fight has extended far beyond her 21-fight undefeated professional career.
For six years, often to the detriment of her sanity, ‘The Heat’ has attempted to light a fire beneath the arse of an industry so fusty in its views that it would sooner brush under the carpet the heinous violence committed against women by one of its chief protagonists than embrace the concept of controlled violence committed by women in its ring.
But make no mistake about it, her perpetual battle has not been fought in vain: the women’s punch-for-pay game has at last blown its glass ceiling to smithereens and is bound for the sporting stratosphere, or at least that general vicinity.
Where London 2012 was female amateur boxing’s watershed moment, a large portion of its own flag-bearers – Katie Taylor, Claressa Shields, Savannah Marshall, Nicola Adams et al – have ditched their headguards to fight under large promotional banners for belts and money over medals.
This influx of supreme talent is less a rising tide, more a flood. Taylor’s world-title campaign to date – maligned by some for its failure to inspire something guttural in casual observers back home – has largely consisted of drainage: her two recent Argentinian victims, for example, were adamantine in their toughness and deserved at least the career-highest purses they received, but were never likely to capture the imagination.
Unheralded as Anahi Sanchez and Victoria Bustos might have been among armchair fans, they still needed to be fought and comprehensively beaten to make way for the female superfights that will soon supplant their respective world-title reigns.
Hardy, by contrast, while also not possessing the same pugilistic pedigree as her new peers per her own admission, has taken drastic measures to bolster her profile – including a recent venture into MMA – to ensure hers would be a head worth calling for when the time was right.
And so having herself roared into the echo chamber for the bones of her professional career, her business savvy means that she now fits firmly into the bigger picture that she helped paint.
Cliff Hawkins
Cliff Hawkins
To Hardy’s eternal pride – and at least partially to her credit – one fat penny finally dropped on 5 May when boxing’s only undisputed world champion, Cecilia Braekhus of Norway, and her opponent Kali Reis of Rhode Island, became the first women to fight live on U.S. television goliath HBO. Their engaging tussle averaged over 900,000 viewers as part of the network’s Golovkin-Martirosyan broadcast, peaking north of a million.
Such heady figures proved HBO’s era-spanning reticence to be a nonsense, but the Home Box Office repeatedly proclaimed itself to have ‘made history’ in its decision to end an entirely self-imposed snub nonetheless – this in the year 2018.
Undeterred by this writer’s cynicism, though, Hardy offers a more sanguine perspective.
“Yeah, but instead of looking back you really have to look forward,” she explains.
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“I mean, there was a lot of talk about, ‘Well, there have been female fights on TV in the past’, and ‘blah blah blah’, but this was really the first fight where a [U.S.] network went out on a limb and put females as the co-main event on a tremendous card. They knew that it was going to get a lot of attention.
I’ve said for a long time: [UFC president] Dana White took a chance on Ronda Rousey, and put her as the co-main event on a pay-per-view card so that all of these people could see her. And that’s exactly what HBO did, so I couldn’t possibly be more excited, and the last thing I’d say would be: ‘Well, it took long enough!’ Because we’re here. We, as females, fought long enough is more like it.
“I do think that there’s a really long road ahead, still. I mean, in the early ’70s when women were starting to leave their kids at home and go to work, the war wasn’t over. You know? We were still making tons less money than men; there were still so many fewer opportunities for us. There were maybe one or two women in the workplace, and maybe 80% of the women were still suffering from discrimination and sexism and weren’t able to work.
“The fight has to continue. Yes, it’s tremendous that we see women’s boxing on TV; yes, it was tremendous that in 2012, we had the first set of females ever to box at the Olympics. But the fight can’t be over, because the truth is that there are so many of us.
I’m not even among those getting on TV and getting rewarded with a large paycheck, but there are so many women who are better fighters than I am who get a third of the recognition that even I do.
“Yes, we’re getting there, but we have to stay vocal, we have to keep fighting. We can’t listen to people who tell us: ‘Nobody wants to hear about it anymore.’
The iconic Gleason’s Gym in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where Hardy once camped out while homeless but now holds office as a personal trainer when she’s not training personally, sits almost literally Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass – a stone’s throw away from that iconic scene in Once Upon A Time In America.
Sergio Leone’s gangster epic was conducted to a backdrop of cultural amalgamation as well as the advent of both The Jazz Age and Prohibition, but once upon a time in a far more modern America, Heather Hardy would have been prohibited from lacing up the gloves: it was 1994 before Aiba (International Boxing Association) lifted its ban on female combatants, and another year still before women received the green light to compete at the New York Golden Gloves.
Gleason’s, however – and in particular its current owner Bruce Silverglade, the former president of amateur boxing in New York – had other ideas.
To this day, Silverglade’s storied gym and its five rings don’t discriminate by colour, creed or gender. It remains a second home not only for ‘The Heat’, but for some of the hottest talents in feminal combat sports.
Heather Hardy works out in Gleason's Susan Watts
Susan Watts
“I think that women’s boxing has always been a few steps behind,” Hardy muses.
Bruce Silverglade talks about how, in the early ’90s, he used to have to close down Gleason’s and let the girls in at night, after everyone had left!
“His partner [Ira Becker] used to go crazy: ‘BRUCE! You can’t do this! They’re not allowed to fight!’ And he used to say: ‘Well, the bank doesn’t ask me which money is ‘boy money’ and which money is ‘girl money’, so, you know…’
“So even the whole idea of women’s boxing is so many steps behind: women first started boxing in the [U.S.] Nationals, I believe, in 1997. And then it wasn’t until 2012 when we saw the first class of female boxing Olympian.
“And I think what hurt us the most was that, in the time when Christy Martin and Laila Ali were boxing on television, because women’s boxing was in its infancy there was no real competition – there wasn’t exciting fights happening. Because women hadn’t been doing it for long enough!
I’ve been at Gleason’s Gym since day one. Right now, we’ve got seven world champions, and they’re all female. So I’ve gotten the chance to see some of the craziest sparring sessions – all-female – and the most epic fighters that go completely unnoticed and unappreciated because they’re women.
“So, you kind of just hope that these girls – Alicia Ashley, Belinda Laracuente who might have a few fights left in them – will see a time when they can get the recognition that they deserve.”
Getty Images
Getty Images
But for all of Hardy’s endeavour to open doors for her fellow female fighters, she found the doors quite literally shut when she took to the ring for the 19th time at Barclays Center in her native borough of Brooklyn last March.
Hardy had gone through the typical toils of flogging 200 tickets worth a collective $37,000 for her WBC International title fight with Edina Kiss. For the first four rounds of what transpired to be a unanimous-decision victory, however, she was more concerned by the glaring absence of her supporters – including her mother – than she was by the prospect of her belt changing hands.
Hardy had been given the option to fight either first or 11th on the Keith Thurman vs Danny Garcia-headlined card. Rather than keep friends and family waiting in the arena until 1am, she chose the former slot. Little did she know that her fight would reach its halfway point before her supporters would reach their seats.
As The Heat recalls with no little scorn: “I walked out with my coaches holding my championship belt over my head and not one person was there to clap their hands.”
It was to be a seminal moment in her career.
“For me, MMA was a strategic decision,” says Hardy of her decision to temporarily abandon the squared circle for, well, the circle: a year ago this week, she was confirmed to have signed with Bellator MMA. She’s currently 2-1 as a mixed martial artist, and has fought once since in the ring.
“I just thought: ‘After everything I’ve done, I still can’t get recognised in boxing.’
“So MMA was an opportunity for me to branch out and get that recognition somewhere else. I thought: ‘Maybe I can go away and get a bigger fanbase in MMA, and build some sort of résumé to show boxing what it’s missing.’
They put me on Spike TV – I drew all these fans. My fanbase got five times bigger, so I was just thinking: ‘Give me a chance.’ I’ve had three fights with Bellator – all of them shown on Spike TV – and my fanbase has literally went up by five times.
“So now, I’m just kind of like: ‘Hey, I’m going to do whatever makes sense. If boxing isn’t going to give me a chance, I’m gonna just get back in the cage where they love me!’” she laughs.
Hardy celebrates a stoppage win on her MMA debut last June Chad Matthew Carlson
Chad Matthew Carlson
“The truth is I’m going to go wherever the opportunity is,” Hardy continues.
“Right now is an exciting time for women’s boxing, and I’m hopeful that I’ll get an opportunity, right? But I’m not going to come back to boxing unless the fight means something.
“The talks, really, that I’m having with my team and my managers is along the lines of: ‘If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense anymore.’
“I’m 36: if I can’t box for a world title, or some sort of prominent position – because I know I’ve earned that shot – then I’ll just stay in the cage. I’m not going to waste my time in boxing.
I liken it to… Boxing is like that bad boyfriend: abuses you, cheats on you, but you stay with him because you love him so much. And MMA is just that guy with the good job, the nice house, and he wants to pay your daughter’s tuition!
Hardy laughs before adding: “I love boxing and I want to stay, but I’m just being taken care of too well over in MMA!”
Pro boxer Shelly Vincent crashes Hardy's weigh-in at Bellator 185 Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Her dual-star strategy is looking increasingly likely to pay off in spades and see her return to the ring before long, however: Hardy’s amplified profile, fan-friendly fistic style and linguistic poise make for a perfect TV blend as boxing finally heaves itself out of history.
There remains the distinct possibility that, despite a weight disparity and two promoters who remain at loggerheads over a prospective battle between their prized heavyweights, Hardy will one day soon do battle with Ireland’s leading female boxing talent.
Unified lightweight world champion Katie Taylor will likely return to Brooklyn in September for Eddie Hearn’s inaugural show as part of a billion-dollar deal with streaming service DAZN, and her team have earmarked the borough’s resident Irish boxing queen as the ideal dance partner.
“There are only a handful of fights that I would consider,” says Hardy.
Like, you talk about Katie Taylor: very, very popular fighter right now, in the spotlight and close enough to my weight class that maybe we can make something happen. A fight with Katie Taylor is one of the only fights that will get me back in the boxing ring.
“I don’t want to be just a paper champion: I want to go out there and prove that I’m a warrior, I’m a fighter, and I deserve my 21-0 record. That’s the kind of fight where I would have the opportunity to show that.
A fight with Katie Taylor would be tremendous – for women, for Brooklyn boxing, for Irish boxing!
“Oh my God, she’s just phenomenal,” says Hardy of her potential adversary. “She produces beautiful, technical boxing, sound boxing – one of the best boxers I’ve seen: her distance, her footwork; her ability to stay out of range, to close the distance real fast, throw combinations and get out of there. I’ve not seen that before. That’s classic boxing skills.”
When I first saw Katie fighting in Brooklyn I started to get excited. I was like: ‘Wow, okay, perhaps this could actually build up to something huge down the line: two Irish girls in Brooklyn.’
Matt Heasley / INPHO
Matt Heasley / INPHO / INPHO
Hardy first became aware of Taylor when she chanced her arm at Olympic qualification in 2011 – this despite having to pull out all the stops to weigh enough to compete up at lightweight.
She had been boxing for no more than a year but clawed her way into the semis, eventually losing out to Mikaela Mayer – now a burgeoning professional who herself will surely share the ring with Taylor before long.
Rather than wait for another bash at the Olympics when she would have been 34, Hardy headed for the professional ranks and made her debut one week before Taylor won gold at London 2012.
Their paths have never truly converged to this point, but the Bray woman – and more pertinently her promoter, Hearn – did cross Hardy’s radar last spring. With typical cheek, the Matchroom chief warned fans to “beware of cheap imitations for women’s boxing, because they haven’t all got the style to make it entertaining and Katie has.”
It was a remark which drew the ire of many – not least Hardy, who had spent the previous five years demanding respect and recognition for boxing’s female protagonists.
Stephen McCarthy
Stephen McCarthy
Indeed, Hearn’s sentiment – sincere or not – still rankles.
“My thing wasn’t that Katie isn’t an exceptional boxer,” Hardy explains.
“Look, I’m very self-aware: what’s my strength? I’m a warrior, I’m a fighter – nobody’s going to make me stop fighting. I’m not the most pretty, technical, smart fighter; I don’t have the experience like these other girls. But I’m tough as shit, right?
“So when I talked about the fighters who had been described as ‘cheap imitations’ of Katie, I was talking about the girls that I see every day that don’t get the recognition that Katie gets – or even that I get. Think Alicia Ashley, Ronica Jeffrey, Cindy and Amanda Serrano – although, you know, Amanda Serrano has gotten quite a few accolades, but you get what I’m saying.
So to say something like that to the public – that every female fighter is a cheap imitation of Katie – really says that there aren’t tons of us out there that deserve a chance. How could you write off a whole sport like that when there are women calling for – and who deserve – so much more than they’re getting?
“And again, I’m not really complaining about myself, but rather my sparring partners, my gym-mates. My friends.”
Still, there are no differences to settle should Hardy and Taylor ever step to it.
A decision made 90 years ago for familial betterment dictates that they’re separated by an ocean, but the Brooklynite and Bray legend are bonded more than by Irishness or The Warrior’s Code: theirs is a shared cause – the betterment of women’s boxing – and their coming-together on the right platform would go a long way toward accelerating its coming of age.
It would be some battle, but as Hardy warns, it wouldn’t constitute even half the real battle.
“I really feel respect is important”, she says, “and I don’t want to ask for a fight in a vicious kind of way, because I do respect Katie and everything she’s done. But it would be wonderful for women’s boxing.
And anyway, I can’t trash talk either! I started fighting because when I was younger, when the other girls would pick on me, I’d hit them. So I’m not as nice as Katie, but I can’t trash-talk people because I’m just not good at it. I’m way better at fighting than I am at talking!
“But I’d love the chance to fight Katie. I mean, if it doesn’t happen, I’ll jump back in the cage and figure out my career from there – or maybe I could fight Jelena [Mrdjenovich] for the 126 title – but Katie is something that my team is definitely interested in talking to Katie’s team about.
The one thing I’ll say, though, is that American boxing is failing to pay females what they’re being paid overseas. I believe Cecilia Brækhus – an undefeated, undisputed world champion – got $50,000 for her fight on HBO. An undefeated, undisputed world champion in a co-main event on Cinco de Mayo weekend at the StubHub Center? For a male fighter, that would have been a $250,000 or $300,000 payday – easily, if not more.
“This is why I say we have so much more to fight for – because the pay inequity is overwhelming.
I don’t think people are giving Cecilia enough credit for taking the fight in America for a small purse just to open doors for other females. I know that Jelena Mrdjenovich – one of my favourite fighters – is getting airtime in Canada, making $50,000, $60,000 per fight. So while I’d love to fight her for her title, we can’t make that fight happen: nobody in New York will pay her anything close to that.
“So the politics in boxing really make it difficult, as well.”
Hardy could face Katie Taylor in a battle for Brooklyn Getty Images
Getty Images
The most Hardy has ever pocketed from a boxing match is $12,000. All of Taylor’s opponents to date have earned career-high purses: her last three have earned four to five times more than they had for any prior contest, and Hardy would most likely reap a larger reward still – especially if their prospective clash were to land on DAZN and Sky Sports as expected.
She’s keen to stress, though, that while she’s cognisant of the potential spoils, she doesn’t intend to price herself out of a fight that would go a long way toward defining her career.
“No, no, no! I’m not saying I would be fussy about the money in a fight with Katie”, Hardy says, “but I’m just wondering, in order for the fight to be in New York, would they pay me the same to box in America, or would the purses be larger in the UK or Ireland – hypothetically speaking.
“I’m not saying that I would bitch about the money, because I recognise that right now, that is one of the few fights out there were you can walk into payday!” she laughs.
I’d do it wherever the money is right. I’d love to box in Brooklyn, but if you’re going to pay me a hell of a lot more money to fight across the pond, then we’re taking this Brooklyn girl on an airplane to see land I’ve never seen before. I’m perfectly okay with that!
Hardy’s hometown seems all the more likely in any case: Taylor already has one foot across the pond, and she’s set to play a large role in Hearn’s U.S. venture which kicks off properly this autumn.
Moreover, Brooklyn has been pencilled in with a view to becoming the Bray woman’s second home of sorts, and the fact that its full-time inhabitants such as Amanda Serrano and Hardy are unlikely to forfeit their territory without a fight actually suits all parties down to the ground.
For the latter Brooklynite, though, it’s about more than parochialism, world titles, money, or even winning. Rather, it’s about the culmination of eight years’ blood, sweat and tears. It’s about finally being afforded the opportunity to afford the opportunity; a chance to grace the stage she strived so tirelessly to set not only for herself, but for others who for years have been confronted by the same tired tropes and prejudices.
For Heather Hardy, it’s about the perpetual fight to be a fighter.
“If my team were to talk to me about doing a fight with Katie Taylor, I would really have to commit to stopping my MMA training, and focus completely on a boxing camp for a significant period of time,” she says.
“I would just have to make myself the best boxer that I know I can be, and avoid all distractions.
“I mean, not to make excuses in any type of way, but more to state a fact: I’ve never had a full boxing camp the way some other fighters have, because I work two jobs and take care of my daughter.
With a fight of this magnitude, everything would change for me: I would lessen my workload, get sponsors on board who might be able to help me with my rent so I wouldn’t have to work both my jobs; I’d get family on board to help me with picking up my daughter to and from school, doing homework. I would really dedicate myself to this fight camp in a way that I’ve never been able to before, because it would pay me the amount of money where I would actually be able to be an athlete.
Getty Images
Getty Images
“I’ve never had the chance to be an athlete”, Hardy adds, “because I’m a mom and an employee at a billion different places, always running around. Financially, I’ve never really been able to have a proper fight camp.
“I’ve paid my dues: I’ve done a lot vocally to spread the word about women’s boxing. And I’m not going to be around for very much longer: I’m 36, I only want to do a couple more boxing fights.
At the beginning of my career – literally after my pro debut – I was homeless. I was working six jobs trying to make ends meet. And certainly with the growth of my success over the years, and with MMA, my situation is certainly a lot better now.
“But like a champion – like an athlete – I’m always striving to do more, to be more. I don’t think I’ve really had the chance to show my fans and the boxing world what I’m capable of. I would love to make that the end of my career, to show people: ‘I did deserve it.’”
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'A fight with Katie Taylor is one of the only fights that will get me back in the boxing ring'
ELEVEN YEARS BEFORE it was requisitioned as an armed merchant cruiser and sunk by a German submarine west of the Outer Hebrides, the T.S.S. Caledonia departed Glasgow for America’s east coast via Moville, Co. Donegal.
A pit-stop in The Forgotten County was all the more poignant for Heather Hardy’s great-grandmother, for whom Ireland would never become the forgotten country despite her emigration – first to Scotland with her husband, a boatsman – then Brooklyn, New York.
Hardy’s roots can be traced back to “a few miles outside Dublin.” They meander through Mountjoy Street in the Irish capital, where her grandmother grew up alongside 13 siblings some years before the family’s transatlantic crossing in 1928.
“They were across back and forth from Dublin to Scotland,” Hardy says of her mother’s side. “My great-grandfather was a sailor, so my grandmother would have to take the kids – her siblings – back and forth. I can’t think of the name of the town in Scotland, but it was right on the water.
“My family came to Brooklyn, and my momma lived in the same house that my grandmother lived in. The whole community where I’m from is third-generation Irish. People came over from Dublin and that side, and all settled in this small community in Brooklyn.”
“I thought New York was just a part of Ireland when I was a little girl,” laughs Hardy. “I grew up thinking that New York was only Irish people, because we were all part of this little community in Gerritsen Beach. To me, everyone in New York was Irish!
“But I guess I’d be going to represent America over there! I wouldn’t really be seen as an Irish girl, right?”
Hardy comes from a family of strong female leads: her great-grandmother, having traversed the Atlantic, became the first volunteer firefighter in the family’s Brooklyn neighbourhood of Gerritsen Beach – a tight-knit, Irish-dominated fishing enclave east of Sheepshead. Her grandmother cared for 13 siblings and was the first female gym teacher in the same neighbourhood’s local Catholic school.
Her mother always told her that ‘no one on the street is going to beat you like your momma’. It was a fairly shrewd observation by all accounts.
And it’s just as well she’s the continuation of a teak-tough lineage, for Hardy herself has endured suffering outside of the boxing ring which dwarves the damage she’s shipped within it.
The woman is a fighter.
Hardy is a divorced single mother who, at one juncture not long ago, was working six jobs – including selling lights, delivering books and running websites – in order to support not only herself and her daughter, Annie, but her sister and nephew with whom she shared an apartment.
That was subsequently obliterated by an electrical fire. Their living arrangement had been makeshift – no insurance money – and so Hardy and her sister were forced to uproot their kids and move back in with their own parents.
Enter Hurricane Sandy: in October 2012, five days after Hardy’s second professional fight, her folks’ home was torn asunder by the 185km/h winds which ravaged America’s east coast.
Her parents spent the bones of a year living in their local church rectory.
Having caught the fighting bug a couple of years prior, Hardy took up temporary residence at Brooklyn’s famed Gleason’s Gym in which she trained, but it was no home for the seven-year-old Annie, who was sent to stay with cousins some 80 kilometres away in Long Island.
It was Hardy’s own childhood which bore her greatest trauma, though – one incomparable to the personal strife which has blighted the odd year since.
At the age of 12, she was raped by a 29-year-old man.
Because Hardy was smoking weed with him at the time (she maintains the man in question laced her cannabis with something more sinister), she told nobody of the attack for years. Plagued by a fallacious guilt, she instead harboured the pain alone into adulthood before eventually informing her now-ex-husband and, just over six years ago, her family.
Her abuser still walks the streets – her streets, in Gerritsen Beach – over two decades later, and she has spotted him on several occasions. The sight of him still terrifies her, and while Hardy describes rape as ‘a life sentence’, she has long since overcome the gnawing agony of self-blame: the burden should never have been hers. It will always be his.
Boxing’s speedbumps are infinitesimal by comparison, but even within the fistic realm Hardy’s fight has extended far beyond her 21-fight undefeated professional career.
For six years, often to the detriment of her sanity, ‘The Heat’ has attempted to light a fire beneath the arse of an industry so fusty in its views that it would sooner brush under the carpet the heinous violence committed against women by one of its chief protagonists than embrace the concept of controlled violence committed by women in its ring.
But make no mistake about it, her perpetual battle has not been fought in vain: the women’s punch-for-pay game has at last blown its glass ceiling to smithereens and is bound for the sporting stratosphere, or at least that general vicinity.
Where London 2012 was female amateur boxing’s watershed moment, a large portion of its own flag-bearers – Katie Taylor, Claressa Shields, Savannah Marshall, Nicola Adams et al – have ditched their headguards to fight under large promotional banners for belts and money over medals.
This influx of supreme talent is less a rising tide, more a flood. Taylor’s world-title campaign to date – maligned by some for its failure to inspire something guttural in casual observers back home – has largely consisted of drainage: her two recent Argentinian victims, for example, were adamantine in their toughness and deserved at least the career-highest purses they received, but were never likely to capture the imagination.
Unheralded as Anahi Sanchez and Victoria Bustos might have been among armchair fans, they still needed to be fought and comprehensively beaten to make way for the female superfights that will soon supplant their respective world-title reigns.
Hardy, by contrast, while also not possessing the same pugilistic pedigree as her new peers per her own admission, has taken drastic measures to bolster her profile – including a recent venture into MMA – to ensure hers would be a head worth calling for when the time was right.
And so having herself roared into the echo chamber for the bones of her professional career, her business savvy means that she now fits firmly into the bigger picture that she helped paint.
To Hardy’s eternal pride – and at least partially to her credit – one fat penny finally dropped on 5 May when boxing’s only undisputed world champion, Cecilia Braekhus of Norway, and her opponent Kali Reis of Rhode Island, became the first women to fight live on U.S. television goliath HBO. Their engaging tussle averaged over 900,000 viewers as part of the network’s Golovkin-Martirosyan broadcast, peaking north of a million.
Such heady figures proved HBO’s era-spanning reticence to be a nonsense, but the Home Box Office repeatedly proclaimed itself to have ‘made history’ in its decision to end an entirely self-imposed snub nonetheless – this in the year 2018.
Undeterred by this writer’s cynicism, though, Hardy offers a more sanguine perspective.
“Yeah, but instead of looking back you really have to look forward,” she explains.
“I mean, there was a lot of talk about, ‘Well, there have been female fights on TV in the past’, and ‘blah blah blah’, but this was really the first fight where a [U.S.] network went out on a limb and put females as the co-main event on a tremendous card. They knew that it was going to get a lot of attention.
“I do think that there’s a really long road ahead, still. I mean, in the early ’70s when women were starting to leave their kids at home and go to work, the war wasn’t over. You know? We were still making tons less money than men; there were still so many fewer opportunities for us. There were maybe one or two women in the workplace, and maybe 80% of the women were still suffering from discrimination and sexism and weren’t able to work.
“The fight has to continue. Yes, it’s tremendous that we see women’s boxing on TV; yes, it was tremendous that in 2012, we had the first set of females ever to box at the Olympics. But the fight can’t be over, because the truth is that there are so many of us.
“Yes, we’re getting there, but we have to stay vocal, we have to keep fighting. We can’t listen to people who tell us: ‘Nobody wants to hear about it anymore.’
The iconic Gleason’s Gym in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where Hardy once camped out while homeless but now holds office as a personal trainer when she’s not training personally, sits almost literally Down Under The Manhattan Bridge Overpass – a stone’s throw away from that iconic scene in Once Upon A Time In America.
Sergio Leone’s gangster epic was conducted to a backdrop of cultural amalgamation as well as the advent of both The Jazz Age and Prohibition, but once upon a time in a far more modern America, Heather Hardy would have been prohibited from lacing up the gloves: it was 1994 before Aiba (International Boxing Association) lifted its ban on female combatants, and another year still before women received the green light to compete at the New York Golden Gloves.
Gleason’s, however – and in particular its current owner Bruce Silverglade, the former president of amateur boxing in New York – had other ideas.
To this day, Silverglade’s storied gym and its five rings don’t discriminate by colour, creed or gender. It remains a second home not only for ‘The Heat’, but for some of the hottest talents in feminal combat sports.
“I think that women’s boxing has always been a few steps behind,” Hardy muses.
“His partner [Ira Becker] used to go crazy: ‘BRUCE! You can’t do this! They’re not allowed to fight!’ And he used to say: ‘Well, the bank doesn’t ask me which money is ‘boy money’ and which money is ‘girl money’, so, you know…’
“So even the whole idea of women’s boxing is so many steps behind: women first started boxing in the [U.S.] Nationals, I believe, in 1997. And then it wasn’t until 2012 when we saw the first class of female boxing Olympian.
“And I think what hurt us the most was that, in the time when Christy Martin and Laila Ali were boxing on television, because women’s boxing was in its infancy there was no real competition – there wasn’t exciting fights happening. Because women hadn’t been doing it for long enough!
“So, you kind of just hope that these girls – Alicia Ashley, Belinda Laracuente who might have a few fights left in them – will see a time when they can get the recognition that they deserve.”
But for all of Hardy’s endeavour to open doors for her fellow female fighters, she found the doors quite literally shut when she took to the ring for the 19th time at Barclays Center in her native borough of Brooklyn last March.
Hardy had gone through the typical toils of flogging 200 tickets worth a collective $37,000 for her WBC International title fight with Edina Kiss. For the first four rounds of what transpired to be a unanimous-decision victory, however, she was more concerned by the glaring absence of her supporters – including her mother – than she was by the prospect of her belt changing hands.
Hardy had been given the option to fight either first or 11th on the Keith Thurman vs Danny Garcia-headlined card. Rather than keep friends and family waiting in the arena until 1am, she chose the former slot. Little did she know that her fight would reach its halfway point before her supporters would reach their seats.
As The Heat recalls with no little scorn: “I walked out with my coaches holding my championship belt over my head and not one person was there to clap their hands.”
It was to be a seminal moment in her career.
“For me, MMA was a strategic decision,” says Hardy of her decision to temporarily abandon the squared circle for, well, the circle: a year ago this week, she was confirmed to have signed with Bellator MMA. She’s currently 2-1 as a mixed martial artist, and has fought once since in the ring.
“I just thought: ‘After everything I’ve done, I still can’t get recognised in boxing.’
“So MMA was an opportunity for me to branch out and get that recognition somewhere else. I thought: ‘Maybe I can go away and get a bigger fanbase in MMA, and build some sort of résumé to show boxing what it’s missing.’
“So now, I’m just kind of like: ‘Hey, I’m going to do whatever makes sense. If boxing isn’t going to give me a chance, I’m gonna just get back in the cage where they love me!’” she laughs.
“The truth is I’m going to go wherever the opportunity is,” Hardy continues.
“Right now is an exciting time for women’s boxing, and I’m hopeful that I’ll get an opportunity, right? But I’m not going to come back to boxing unless the fight means something.
“The talks, really, that I’m having with my team and my managers is along the lines of: ‘If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense anymore.’
“I’m 36: if I can’t box for a world title, or some sort of prominent position – because I know I’ve earned that shot – then I’ll just stay in the cage. I’m not going to waste my time in boxing.
Hardy laughs before adding: “I love boxing and I want to stay, but I’m just being taken care of too well over in MMA!”
Her dual-star strategy is looking increasingly likely to pay off in spades and see her return to the ring before long, however: Hardy’s amplified profile, fan-friendly fistic style and linguistic poise make for a perfect TV blend as boxing finally heaves itself out of history.
There remains the distinct possibility that, despite a weight disparity and two promoters who remain at loggerheads over a prospective battle between their prized heavyweights, Hardy will one day soon do battle with Ireland’s leading female boxing talent.
Unified lightweight world champion Katie Taylor will likely return to Brooklyn in September for Eddie Hearn’s inaugural show as part of a billion-dollar deal with streaming service DAZN, and her team have earmarked the borough’s resident Irish boxing queen as the ideal dance partner.
“There are only a handful of fights that I would consider,” says Hardy.
“I don’t want to be just a paper champion: I want to go out there and prove that I’m a warrior, I’m a fighter, and I deserve my 21-0 record. That’s the kind of fight where I would have the opportunity to show that.
“Oh my God, she’s just phenomenal,” says Hardy of her potential adversary. “She produces beautiful, technical boxing, sound boxing – one of the best boxers I’ve seen: her distance, her footwork; her ability to stay out of range, to close the distance real fast, throw combinations and get out of there. I’ve not seen that before. That’s classic boxing skills.”
Hardy first became aware of Taylor when she chanced her arm at Olympic qualification in 2011 – this despite having to pull out all the stops to weigh enough to compete up at lightweight.
She had been boxing for no more than a year but clawed her way into the semis, eventually losing out to Mikaela Mayer – now a burgeoning professional who herself will surely share the ring with Taylor before long.
Rather than wait for another bash at the Olympics when she would have been 34, Hardy headed for the professional ranks and made her debut one week before Taylor won gold at London 2012.
Their paths have never truly converged to this point, but the Bray woman – and more pertinently her promoter, Hearn – did cross Hardy’s radar last spring. With typical cheek, the Matchroom chief warned fans to “beware of cheap imitations for women’s boxing, because they haven’t all got the style to make it entertaining and Katie has.”
It was a remark which drew the ire of many – not least Hardy, who had spent the previous five years demanding respect and recognition for boxing’s female protagonists.
Indeed, Hearn’s sentiment – sincere or not – still rankles.
“My thing wasn’t that Katie isn’t an exceptional boxer,” Hardy explains.
“Look, I’m very self-aware: what’s my strength? I’m a warrior, I’m a fighter – nobody’s going to make me stop fighting. I’m not the most pretty, technical, smart fighter; I don’t have the experience like these other girls. But I’m tough as shit, right?
“So when I talked about the fighters who had been described as ‘cheap imitations’ of Katie, I was talking about the girls that I see every day that don’t get the recognition that Katie gets – or even that I get. Think Alicia Ashley, Ronica Jeffrey, Cindy and Amanda Serrano – although, you know, Amanda Serrano has gotten quite a few accolades, but you get what I’m saying.
“And again, I’m not really complaining about myself, but rather my sparring partners, my gym-mates. My friends.”
Still, there are no differences to settle should Hardy and Taylor ever step to it.
A decision made 90 years ago for familial betterment dictates that they’re separated by an ocean, but the Brooklynite and Bray legend are bonded more than by Irishness or The Warrior’s Code: theirs is a shared cause – the betterment of women’s boxing – and their coming-together on the right platform would go a long way toward accelerating its coming of age.
It would be some battle, but as Hardy warns, it wouldn’t constitute even half the real battle.
“I really feel respect is important”, she says, “and I don’t want to ask for a fight in a vicious kind of way, because I do respect Katie and everything she’s done. But it would be wonderful for women’s boxing.
“But I’d love the chance to fight Katie. I mean, if it doesn’t happen, I’ll jump back in the cage and figure out my career from there – or maybe I could fight Jelena [Mrdjenovich] for the 126 title – but Katie is something that my team is definitely interested in talking to Katie’s team about.
“This is why I say we have so much more to fight for – because the pay inequity is overwhelming.
“So the politics in boxing really make it difficult, as well.”
The most Hardy has ever pocketed from a boxing match is $12,000. All of Taylor’s opponents to date have earned career-high purses: her last three have earned four to five times more than they had for any prior contest, and Hardy would most likely reap a larger reward still – especially if their prospective clash were to land on DAZN and Sky Sports as expected.
She’s keen to stress, though, that while she’s cognisant of the potential spoils, she doesn’t intend to price herself out of a fight that would go a long way toward defining her career.
“No, no, no! I’m not saying I would be fussy about the money in a fight with Katie”, Hardy says, “but I’m just wondering, in order for the fight to be in New York, would they pay me the same to box in America, or would the purses be larger in the UK or Ireland – hypothetically speaking.
“I’m not saying that I would bitch about the money, because I recognise that right now, that is one of the few fights out there were you can walk into payday!” she laughs.
An Irish bout remains unlikely for the simple fact that Dublin remains the right place at the wrong time, though Cork has recently been mooted by Eddie Hearn as a potential host city for the otherwise doomed Taylor homecoming.
Hardy’s hometown seems all the more likely in any case: Taylor already has one foot across the pond, and she’s set to play a large role in Hearn’s U.S. venture which kicks off properly this autumn.
Moreover, Brooklyn has been pencilled in with a view to becoming the Bray woman’s second home of sorts, and the fact that its full-time inhabitants such as Amanda Serrano and Hardy are unlikely to forfeit their territory without a fight actually suits all parties down to the ground.
For the latter Brooklynite, though, it’s about more than parochialism, world titles, money, or even winning. Rather, it’s about the culmination of eight years’ blood, sweat and tears. It’s about finally being afforded the opportunity to afford the opportunity; a chance to grace the stage she strived so tirelessly to set not only for herself, but for others who for years have been confronted by the same tired tropes and prejudices.
For Heather Hardy, it’s about the perpetual fight to be a fighter.
“If my team were to talk to me about doing a fight with Katie Taylor, I would really have to commit to stopping my MMA training, and focus completely on a boxing camp for a significant period of time,” she says.
“I would just have to make myself the best boxer that I know I can be, and avoid all distractions.
“I mean, not to make excuses in any type of way, but more to state a fact: I’ve never had a full boxing camp the way some other fighters have, because I work two jobs and take care of my daughter.
“I’ve never had the chance to be an athlete”, Hardy adds, “because I’m a mom and an employee at a billion different places, always running around. Financially, I’ve never really been able to have a proper fight camp.
“I’ve paid my dues: I’ve done a lot vocally to spread the word about women’s boxing. And I’m not going to be around for very much longer: I’m 36, I only want to do a couple more boxing fights.
“But like a champion – like an athlete – I’m always striving to do more, to be more. I don’t think I’ve really had the chance to show my fans and the boxing world what I’m capable of. I would love to make that the end of my career, to show people: ‘I did deserve it.’”
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Taylor: ‘Serrano was the one to beat, but she has to step up and take the fight: Ireland against Puerto Rico!’
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Boxing Bray vs Brooklyn Heather Hardy Irish Boxing Katie Taylor