• Heather Hardy : The Fight Lady - The Fight CityThe Fight City
    http://www.thefightcity.com/heather-hardy-fight-lady-boxing-mma

    To understand why Heather Hardy thinks of herself as a fighter is to know her life story, which is well documented. Raped by a drug dealer in her neighborhood in Brooklyn before she hit her teens. Married and divorced before she finished college. A single mom working multiple jobs because she had no child support. Hurricane Sandy destroying her home and forcing her to crash with her sister. Running nine miles a day to train at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn’s Dumbo district.

    Today, she is one of the most recognizable faces in combat sports, her life battles serving as a backdrop to a perfect 20–0 record in her five years as a professional boxer.

    (...)

    Hardy herself could have chosen the path well traveled. With a forensic science degree from John Jay College in New York, she could have landed a job at the police force. Or she could have chosen to pursue a career in internet marketing, which she had started to do after college. Yet she chose a path that many tend to view as having more drawbacks than benefits for a woman.

    “I’m a very passionate person and I didn’t feel passionate about anything I was doing,” she said of her life prior to boxing. “It sounds so horrible coming from me, saying this as a mother. I was a mother and I love my daughter but I didn’t feel like it was what defined me. I’m her mom but I didn’t want to die just being her mom. I needed something where I wasn’t a mother, I wasn’t someone’s ex-wife, where I wasn’t just someone’s friend or someone’s employee. I needed something that made me.” And Heather Hardy found that boxing, and especially winning, gave her that sense of having achieved something for herself.

    (...)

    “I don’t see this dying out and me ending up as a hotdog vendor or something,” she laughed. “I’m smart. I didn’t get this far without knowing how to get this far.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OySqulqWZAg

    #boxe (bon #mma là)