Heather Hardy: You have to show little girls what they can become - you can’t be what you can’t see

For Heather Hardy it means so much to fight at Madison Square Garden. “Oh yes. As a native New Yorker to be able to fight at the Mecca of sports, it’s an honour,” explains the flyweight fighter, who is enjoying being celebrated as a strong woman with a very clear message.

“I think you have to show little girls what they can become. You can’t be what you can’t see. They can be a boxer or a martial artist and a mother, a divorced woman, a female who likes to dress well and show off," Hardy told The Telegraph as she returns to the venue across the Hudson River in Manhattan on Friday night - from her native Brooklyn - having made her mixed martial arts debut under the Bellator MMA banner at the hallowed venue two years ago.

Hardy had crossed to mixed martial arts from being a boxing world champion. "My message is you can be all these things. One of them or ten of them. It doesn’t matter. Be the best you, you can be."

Hardy, a single mother in her thirties, has a tale all of her own. The fighter has a troubled past, not of her own doing. A dark black cloud entered her life in her early teens. Hardy went public two years ago about being the victim of aggregious sexual assault as a teenager. She was in with the wrong crowd at the time. Her rapist was 29.

"I never breathed a word about being raped because I knew my aunt went to church with his mother, or if I go to the grocery store, I'll run into his cousin," she had told espnW. "Women from my neighbourhood stay quiet because they're too concerned about how it will affect everyone else. I thought it was my fault for smoking pot and hanging out with these people, because I was the one who bought the papers," she explained at the time.

"When in reality, a 29-year-old man should not be giving a young girl drugs. As an adult, with a daughter that age, I now realize how I was raped. It was planned from the beginning of the evening. But as a girl, I thought I was the one who was to blame."

She took up fight sports in her twenties. Three weeks later, aged 28, Hardy won her first kickboxing match in front of a few thousand people at a venue on Long Island.

To hear Hardy speak, is to be inspired into the many of the reasons why fight sports have a deeper place in our society than we often care to believe. Born and raised in South Brooklyn, in Gerritsen Beach, a working-class community of around 5,000, and sporting Celtic tattoos, the former women's boxing and kick-boxing world champion, turned her focus on martial arts because it was hard to make a living.

The world of MMA, she feels, treats women with more equanimity than boxing has for many years. Hardy is a ferocious fighter, attack is her defence. And it does not always pay off. She wins some, she loses some. But she is certainly consistent. As indeed she feels about MMA, and her treatment by Bellator MMA.

“MMA is it’s consistent and boxing isn’t," she told me. "You have to wait on other promoters’ schedules. I went six months trying to get a unification fight that fell through at the last minute. Boxing can be a disappointing sport when you have so many conflicting forces in charge, trying to make things happen. I’m 37 years old, I don’t have time to be waiting on other people’s schedules. I’ve options. I’ve MMA and plenty of room for me to grow here. I’m excited for his fight and what plays out afterwards.”

Boxing has frustrated her, in spite of its recent rise with female stars in Claressa Shields in the USA, and Katie Taylor in Ireland, both gold medallists from the Olympic Games in London in 2012 who have transitioned to the pro fighting game with great aplomb.

“If that wasn’t so in boxing, maybe we would see more exciting fights. Maybe we would see fighters and promoters taking a chance. And maybe we would have more fans of (women's) boxing if more exciting fights were made. We have one good fight a year that everyone looks forward to. After that it’s basically the same run around. What champion is going to fight what tune up fight. Boxing is so political. Perhaps it’s been my time spent in the sport, but it’s really soured me. I love the pureness of MMA. I’m just looking to put on a good show and keep the fans happy.”

"We're settling for smaller pay checks and not bigger opportunities. The idea that just because we're going to put one female on this card isn't enough. We're not just females, we're athletes. We're just like the guys. There are great female boxers and there are terrible ones. There are ones that deserve a lot more than they're getting."

Had Hardy watched the recent Taylor fight against Delfine Persoon at Madison Square Garden on the night the Irish woman unified the lightweight division. “I sure did. I’d like to start by saying, this is in no way a reflection of how I feel about Katie Taylor. She’s an exceptional fighter and boxer. She’s probably one of the biggest stars in women’s boxing. But I will say, I don’t think she deserved to walk away with that woman’s title. I don’t. I don’t think she beat the girl. You have to beat the champion to take her belt. I don’t think either girl necessarily got beat, but the way the last five rounds played out and then they took her belts from her? That was a travesty, as far as I’m concerned. I thought it was real disappointing.”

“I had Persoon up by one round. You just think the politics of boxing, they’ll never give her the win so they’ll give her a draw. And then she doesn’t lose her belt. To take belts, that shit broke my heart.”

Hardy fightsTaylor Turner at The Garden. “I know she’s coming off a two-fight win streak and suffered some bad losses early in her career. She changed team and came back with two early first-round stoppages. I’m expecting fire from this girl. I’m expecting an athlete who is looking to take the spotlight and I’m ready for it. I got mean, I got tough, I got strong and I’m ready for it.”

As a natural stand-up fighter, Hardy is developing her ground game. “My last fight, my head coach was a wrestling coach, a really brilliant one from Renzo Gracie's Academy. And my last fight, he was the first person to show me any ground game or jiu jitsu. So my last fight ended up being on the ground. The fans were so upset. Because it was beginners jiu jitsu. It was a tremendous moment of personal growth because my bad jiu jitsu was better than someone else’s. I realise the fans want me to go in there and bang it out. My focus is on what the fans want to see and that’s me coming forward.”

Hardy is unsure whether she will ever go back to boxing. “I’m not sure. I’ve kind of got to a point where I’ve got to figure that out. I’m not going to get that far in MMA if I don’t crack down and focus on it, spend time on it. After this fight I’m going to sit down with the team and figure out what we’re going to do.” One suspects that fighting forms part of a catharsis here, fighting for pride, for a deeper sense of growing out of adversity.

I asked Hardy today why she fights. "Because I'm good at it."

Bellator MMA is live on Sky Sports on Friday night.