There’s no shame in being gone and staying gone. That’s true of life, but it’s particularly true of combat sports.
Sometimes you’re just done and you have no reason to go back; no reason to even consider it. It can be mental or physical, or maybe a little of both, but your run is over and it’s time to look to the future.
Unfortunately, a painful number of combat athletes don’t see it that way. They see retirement as a particularly long layoff between fights as opposed to a concrete out from a sport unforgiving to its elderly.
Even the smartest of the smart ones can’t stay gone.
For his part, colorful character-turned-color commentator Dan Hardy looks like he’s about to add his name to that list.
Recently, the beloved brawler who entertained UFC masses from 2008-2012 has begun to bang the drum for a return to the cage. Those two years of absence came at the insistence of a heart condition that many—doctors included—felt would see him out of the fight game forever.
Until now, that looked to be the case.
Hardy had taken up a role in the commentary position on Fight Pass shows happening in Europe and the Middle East, and he was doing quite well with it. He’s intelligent and articulate with a knack for communication that much more seasoned color men of the sport don’t naturally possess.
But old flames burn brightly, and the flame to fight seems to be the hardest to extinguish in martial artists. Common sense and laws of reality be damned, sometimes you just have to punch someone in the face for a few thousand dollars.
And so Hardy, a never-undersized welterweight, now wants to get back into the UFC fray as a lightweight. He’s been training but not at an elite level, and dietary changes have contributed to him walking about nearly 40 pounds lighter than he did as a contender only a couple of years ago.
The name Diego Sanchez has been bandied about, but nothing has been finalized on account of Sanchez already having an opponent lined up and Hardy having no actual clearance to safely pursue his recent desires.
All of this is to say, in the simplest way imaginable, that this is bad idea. All of it. Hardy needs to stay comfortably in his position cageside, developing his broadcast skills and making a nice career for himself in doing so.
He, like many ill-advised combatants who simply refuse to go home, needs to accept that his fight career is best left completed and no amount of lost weight or enthusiasm to lay a beating on a grown man should come before that fact. It’s equal parts unwise and unsafe for him to continue the pursuit.
No one can say where this will end up. It could be anywhere from the best Dan Hardy the world has ever seen romping to a lightweight title to the worst Dan Hardy anyone has ever seen looking like a sick man trying for one last crack at glory.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter.
Given how he got to this point, the best place for either version of Hardy is cageside. That’s close enough to the centre of the Octagon for him, and for anyone who cares about the safety of athletes in the sport.
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