Heather Hardy Turns Up The Heat in Brooklyn – Women’s Boxing News

By Chris “Man of Few Words” Benedict

Apropos of her fighting moniker, Heather “The Heat” Hardy defended her WBC International Super Bantamweight title at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center Saturday evening on the tail end of a brutal, week-long East Coast heat wave.

“I’m an aggressive fighter, and I think that I stand tall and exchange punches, but when girls get hit a lot, they put their face down and then come in and swing,” Heather told me recently, referring to her first fight against “The Hungarian Assassin” Renata Domsodi this past April. “And that’s what happens, I’m standing there punching and they’re coming in with their face and (smacks the knuckles of both fists together). I’m doing a lot of work on trying to keep my distance and not just wait for someone to run in so I can clock them.”

That bout ended in a no contest when an accidental head-butt in the second round caused a gruesome laceration around Renata’s right eye. Because only three rounds had elapsed, the judges’ scorecards did not factor into the equation. Hardy made it unequivocally clear from the opening bell last night that she was leaving no potential variables to chance.

After entering the ring to Alicia Keys’ “This Girl is on Fire”, Heather relentlessly walked Domsodi backward behind left/right/left combinations thrown from lateral angles, putting bugs on the windshield as Teddy Atlas is so fond of saying. When Domsodi did manage to take the occasional step in the correct direction, Hardy exhibited expert ring generalship and made Renata pay for trespassing on her property by landing anywhere from three to five clean shots. She pressed the advantage by putting bunches of punches together both upstairs and down, slipping and sliding from side to side, moving her head to make her chin a tough target for Renata to aim for. Domsodi did hit her mark a select few times in the 4th and 5th, but was being severely outworked, blood seeping from a cut high on her left cheekbone. By the end of the 6th, the cumulative punishment was etched onto Domsodi’s face, both eyes visibly bruising, the left puffing up and a nasty gash torn through the brow above.

Neither the ringside physician nor referee Shada Murdaugh liked what they saw. Although Heather bounced out of her corner ready to ratchet the temperature up further, Domsodi, already aware of what Hardy would soon learn, did not stir from her stool. The fight had been called off, the official result recorded as a 7th round TKO victory for Heather Hardy.

Happily engaging in some post-fight crowd work, Heather rambled through the arena, title belt draped over her shoulder, thanking her multitude of hardcore Brooklyn supporters and no doubt making many new fans along the way, shaking hands and obliging countless photo-ops. It all comes with the territory and Hardy navigates it with ease and great humility.
As to her future, that is up to her promoter Lou DiBella to determine. There are plenty of promising possibilities open to her and Heather is not one to close a door when she can splinter it to pieces instead.

“It’s kind of hard with women because records aren’t always telling of the caliber of fighter you’re going to go in there with,” Heather explained of the relative disparity in terms of how the numbers game in boxing comes into play for women as opposed to men. “You might have a girl who is 9-9, but her 9 losses all came to world champions.” She illustrates her point by using her first trainer and former WBC Super Bantamweight Women’s World Champion Alicia Ashley (the sister of Heather’s current trainer and partner Devon Cormack), who has a record of 22-10-1, as a prime example. “If that was a guy, they would be like, that’s a bum, let’s bring him in. But as a female, records can be kind of deceiving.”

That being said, proud as she is (and should be) of her undefeated record, which stands now at 14-0 with that one pesky NC, Hardy is simultaneously cognizant of the fact that it can be viewed in a weird way as a sort of liability. “People are now starting to see me as one of the guy fighters. If I want to get publicity around these fights, credibility around these fights, I don’t just want an opponent anymore. But some of my opponents aren’t just opponents. They’re tough fights.”

The big question remains when will these tough fights receive network airtime? Heather told the crowd assembled at the opening ceremonies of this year’s International Boxing Hall of Fame inductions, “I want to show the world that girls can fight too.”

Can they ever. And it’s about damn time they were given a big enough stage on which to prove it.

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