Phill News Entertainment – Phill News
With her left eye swollen shut and blood pouring from her forehead, Heather Hardy tells the ringside doctor that she wants to continue.
She returns to the center of the ring, beats her chest, and exclaims, “I don’t care, I don’t care.”
A nearly 20,000-person audience at the American Airlines Center in Texas rises to its feet and belts out a massive scream of praise in honor of a great warrior.
It is gladiatorial; it is all Hardy knows.
Hardy, 42, has never given up and refuses to modify her lifelong habit in the last minutes of her fight against undisputed featherweight champion Amanda Serrano.
They meet in the center, exchange gloves, and the hectic action begins, with Hardy delivering powerful strikes for the final 15 seconds of the penultimate round before returning to her corner and hitting her chest once more while soaking up the excitement.
A final round of all-out battle ensues before the bell sounds and the two competitors embrace.
The blood is still being wiped from Hardy’s face as ring announcer Jimmy Lennon Jr. prepares to proclaim the outcome.
Serrano wins with a resounding unanimous decision. Hardy expresses no astonishment, surprise, or protest.
Serrano landed nearly twice as many hits, while Brooklyn-born Hardy delivered another brave display.
Hardy’s final competitive fight will take place on August 5, 2023.
“I came out of the ring, got home, and I had double vision,” Hardy told BBC Sport.
“I also had regular concussion symptoms, as do most fighters, but the next day the double vision persisted, and I was walking into things and didn’t feel right.”
“To summarize, it didn’t get any better, but I just became accustomed to it. It’s like everything else; if you break or damage something, you simply train through it.”
A year after her defeat, instead of enjoying the spoils of her lengthy career, Hardy is on the phone with her energy provider, Con Edison.
“My lights are about set to turn off. “I bet you [two-time welterweight champion] Shawn Porter doesn’t have that issue,” Hardy claims.
Hardy and Porter are both former world champions who competed in the same event in 2016 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, but the similarities end there.
Financially, they are worlds different.
“I had this wonderful profession yet it resembles they just pushed me back external the wall and said ‘Simply be cheerful you got the opportunity, Heather, it was pleasant however go sort it out yourself’, ” Solid says.
‘Every time you get a concussion a piece of your brain dies’
On 6 May 2024, Solid posted a proclamation on Instagram affirming that her Uncovered Knuckle Battling Title (BKFC) debut against flyweight champion Christine Ferea, which was planned to happen five days after the fact, was off.
Previous WBO featherweight champion Solid has never been one to keep quiet however there was a hesitance, a refusal, a reluctance to say the word retirement.
All things being equal, Tough closed down the post: “So I said the thing, ya understand what that implies.”
Also, it is clear what she implied.
In the months that trailed not too far behind losing against Serrano, Solid had lost practically 30 lbs in weight, was managing tireless cerebral pains, and couldn’t rest – all side effects of ongoing horrible encephalopathy (CTE).
CTE is a mind condition connected to rehashed hits to the head and blackouts. The condition, which slowly deteriorates over the long run and prompts dementia, must be analyzed after death.
“What I realized after was that each time you get a blackout a piece of your mind bites the dust and you never get it back, your cerebrum simply continues living without it since it doesn’t have any idea what it lost,” Solid says.
“Throughout the long term I’ve lost such a large amount of my cerebrum that I can’t bear to lose anything more.”
The outer scars have since a long time ago however inside they wait and might very well won’t ever vanish.
Only a couple of months on from reporting her retirement, Solid is as yet finding some peace with having the carpet grabbed from under her.
“That was long stretches of crying, attempting to comprehend because all that I could do was as far as possible and presently I need to stop when it gets hard to save my life, ” Strong says.
“Goodness, not fair. Give that to another person.”
‘I have to start over again’
Tough cuts a crestfallen figure as she talks.
Finding a seat at her kitchen table in her one-room loft taking care of gear heaped behind the scenes and wearing heart-molded glasses, Solid endeavors to downplay what is happening.
“I can’t say anything negative, I’m holding tight and on the right half of the soil,” she says.
Boxing turned into Tough’s personality and Gleason’s exercise center in Brooklyn turned into her home. She has emptied her entire being into the game, however what has she gotten in kind? What does she need to show for over 10 years of hard labor?
“The most recent two months for me has been returning and figuring out how to live this way,” Strong says.
She can as of now not hit the exercise center consistently, as she has accomplished for the most amazing aspect of twenty years, and has been cautioned by clinical experts that any further actual weight on her body could have serious outcomes.
The lightest of exercises presently causes Solid to feel queasy – she passed out when her pulse went up in the wake of attempting to work out with a rope.
Migraines are ordinary, her visual perception is still yet to get back to business as usual, she battles to rest and seldom has a hunger.
Strong would frequently mentor at Gleason’s rec center to bring in some additional cash, yet her declining well-being has even forgotten about that choice.
“I said ‘Dumb, you’re not in a wheelchair’. It’s a cross-breed sensation of high-five you made it out yet I gave everything and I don’t have anything, ” Solid says.
“What is difficult for me to grasp is that I gave so a lot and presently I need to begin once more.”
Strong’s course into boxing was distant from the conventional way.
She had proactively moved on from John Jay School of Law enforcement in New York with a degree in criminological brain science and loved the late High Court equity and ladies’ freedoms pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg before she even considered the possibility of a lifelong in boxing.
Strong realized she was an “influential lady” yet was uncertain how to put her powers to best utilize.
Attempting to make close meat as a solitary mum and working anyplace between two to six positions all at once, Strong first ventured into an enclosing rec center in 2010 as a method for getting a break from the monotonous routine. Before long turned into an energy and possibly an exit plan as she strived to give superior personal satisfaction to her little girl.
In April 2011, Solid, matured 29, contended in her most memorable beginner challenge and turned into the US public featherweight champion only two months after the fact.
After making her expert presentation in the late spring of 2012, Strong left on a six-year unbeaten run, crossing 23 challenges and finishing in a triumph against Shelly Vincent for the WBO featherweight title at the Theater, inside Madison Square Nursery.
She likewise tested herself in the realm of blended combative techniques and contended multiple times under the standard of advancement Bellator – winning two and losing two.
A first loss in the boxing ring came because of Serrano, a seven-division title holder when they initially met in 2019 and she resigned with a general record of 24 successes, three misfortunes, and one no-challenge.
Strong made that progress inside the ring notwithstanding confronting difficulties few might at any point envision or would wish to encounter in her own life.
“There was everything from typhoons to vagrancy and house fires,” she says.
“We were in the city with my folks living in a congregation cellar, whatever might happen occurred.
“Be that as it may, I’m staying here since I have confidence in God and I’ve strolled with him this whole way. It’s a straightforward thought that you walk right, you do well and you don’t think back. You don’t surrender, you don’t stop and what you merit will come.”
‘Pay gap in female sports is absurd’
Solid has for quite some time been perhaps the most intense voice in the room about featuring orientation imbalance and pay uniqueness in the game.
Despite her profile, Solid needed to offer her passes to guarantee she emerged from battles with some monetary award.
“Ladies are making 80 pennies to the dollar, the compensation hole in female games is silly,” Solid says.
“This is the sort of thing that ladies are continually battling for, continually improving, and look how far we’ve come in a long time from when my vocation began and young ladies were not permitted to box on Kickoff.
“The folks would agree ‘Heather I love you however I’m not putting you on, you’re insane’. A decade prior, you’d think it was 1974. It will change given ladies like me who will not quiet down.”
There has without a doubt been an adjustment of the scene with female fighters getting more unmistakable situations on cards and pay-per-view occasions, albeit Solid accepts there has not been an improvement in that frame of mind back it up.
“Females are being placed in prime spots on prime cards and told they aren’t selling battles,” Strong says.
“They are being placed in the best right on the money the show and being paid a small portion of what that spot is worth.
“I went out and attempted to tell individuals ‘Look, ladies can battle’ However what I truly did was say ‘Look folks ladies will work for no good reason and we’ll do it two times as hard’.”
‘I am my mother’s savage daughter’
With a group of resilient ladies behind her, it is nothing unexpected that Strong has volunteered to be a main figure in the battle for balance.
Strong says her distant grandma, Annie, was one of the first female firemen in quite a while and her grandma was the principal lady to show exercise center in Brooklyn.
“We generally joke that assuming my grandma heard me tell individuals I was Irish she would slap me because my granddad’s family were from Ireland yet she was from Scotland,” Solid says.
She credits her mom, likewise a worker in the local group of firefighters, for aiding shape her.
“My genuine dad attempted to kill us, went to prison and my mum took me and wedded John Solid who is my daddy,” she says.
“An extremely resilient lady came from the cinders so I learned. It’s in my blood. We don’t think back, we will stroll through fire. I’m my mom’s savage girl.”
With one entryway shut, Solid is now hoping to drive open the following one, getting her chief’s permit.
As Solid ponders what has been an exploring profession in battle sports, her eyes light up when requested to pick a feature.
“I’m from New York City and Billy Joel is you know,” she says. “I’m an unfortunate Irish young lady and we sang so many Billy Joel melodies. We as a whole take a brief trip and see him each year when he plays at the Nursery, genuinely for a very long time or somewhere in the vicinity.
“At the point when I made my MMA presentation and I took out the young lady [Alice Yauger] I had cowered at one point and I was standing by listening to everybody yell ‘Strong, Solid, Strong’ and I gazed upward and thought ‘Billy Joel stays here and they are singing my name’.
“I never let go of that.”
