What does boxing owe Heather Hardy?

Heather Hardy sometimes wonders if maybe the sport of boxing would have preferred it if she’d just gone ahead and died.

“That’s how it feels,” Hardy (24-3) told Yahoo Sports. “Because if I had died, nobody would have to answer for it. They wouldn’t have to deal with me anymore.”

Hardy didn’t die, and now she’s adamant about forcing boxing to deal with her. The question is what exactly that means and who should be responsible for it. In many ways it’s a question combat sports have been asking themselves for years, with the answers only arrived at via default and delay.

First, the facts. After over a decade in combat sports and a career that included world titles in boxing and a short stint in MMA with the Bellator organization, Hardy now finds herself in a kind of forced retirement.

At 42, she’s suffering from brain trauma that’s affecting her vision. Ever since her last fight with Amanda Serrano in August 2023 — the second of two 10-round title fights with Serrano, both of which Hardy lost via decision — her vision has been blurry and split. It’s like she’s seeing double, Hardy said, but also like her eyes can’t quite focus.

“At first I figured it was normal, just something left over after a hard fight,” Hardy said. “After a day or two of that I was like, 'Let me go get checked.' Then the ophthalmologist, the eye doctor I went to, they basically told me that my eyes were fine. It’s the brain damage that’s causing it.”

Hardy initially hoped it would clear up on its own if she just followed the doctors’ advice and limited her activity in the gym. They told her these kinds of vision problems weren’t unheard of for fighters later in their careers. The important thing was that she take it easy for a while and avoid any more blows to the head.

“But then money got tough,” Hardy said. “Everybody thought I made millions of dollars. [To fight] Amanda [Serrano], I made under a hundred thousand. But I have a daughter in SUNY Albany. I found myself having to explain for months where all this money went. By January, I needed another fight. And my vision hadn't really come back. What they tell you is when you have problems with your brain, pieces die and you don't know they're gone. So I was just living thinking that this was my new normal and not that anything was really wrong. So I went back and started training for (a bare-knuckle boxing match in BKFC). And that was in late January.”

By March, Hardy said, she’d lost nearly 40 pounds. She felt nauseous much of the time. She couldn’t eat, couldn’t keep food down. She got severe headaches out of nowhere. She rarely slept more than a couple hours at a time. The BKFC bout was originally slated for 130 pounds, Hardy said, but the promoter asked to move it to 135 pounds.

“I think I was 117 [pounds] at the time,” Hardy said. “I thought, I have to go to the doctor. And that’s when my whole career ended.”

Doctors were appalled at the idea that someone who was still clearly dealing with the effects of brain damage would even consider a boxing match, Hardy said. Taking a few months off from sparring wasn’t going to be good enough, they told her. She needed to not get hit in the head anymore.

She still had her job at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, teaching the finer points of boxing to enthusiastic civilians, but just getting there for work each day was tough.

“Some days, my vision isn’t as bad, so I can ride the Citi Bike to work,” Hardy said. “But when it’s really bad, I can’t. I’ll fall off. I’ve got scars on my arms from burning myself on the oven. I just thought it was because I was being dumb, but it was because I couldn’t see. I’ve got a scar on my face from falling down the stairs in the subway. And if I try to take the train, I’m very jumpy because I don’t see things until the last minute. I have no [peripheral vision]. I get paranoid because I’m looking around and then, bam, someone is right next to me.”

The people at Gleason’s have been supportive, Hardy said. But the people who promoted her fights for all those years, they’re the ones she feels abandoned by.

“I feel like I gave my sight and my body to pay someone else’s mortgage,” Hardy said. “Now I’m basically disabled and I just need some help with the rent, and where are they? … Before, I was always told, ‘Be quiet, Heather. Don’t cause trouble, Heather.’ Because if I pissed them off they could hurt my career. But my career is over now, so what do I care if Lou DiBella looks bad?”

DiBella, who promoted some of Hardy’s fights, declined to speak on the record beyond expressing support for Hardy and general dismay at the “lack of sufficient or fair opportunities for women” in boxing.

Bruce Silverglade, who has continued to support Hardy in his role as president of Gleason’s Gym, argued that what Hardy’ experiencing is nothing at all new in boxing — it’s just new for women’s boxing.

“I've seen this many, many times, but always with men,” Silverglade said. “When they get to the point where they have to retire, whether it's on their own or whether it's forced upon them, it's a dramatic situation. The vast majority of them have no alternative, nothing to turn to. Boxing was their whole life. So now this has happened to Heather, and it's because the women [boxers] are now coming to that age. The women only really started boxing maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago. So now the better fighters are starting to hit this age where they have to retire again, either on their own accord or because they're told to, and it’s very emotionally draining.”

Silverglade pointed to the lack of a national regulatory body for boxers. While athletes in the NFL and MLB have players associations to push for pensions and ongoing healthcare, he said, boxers have nothing.

“I’ve owned the gym for 42 years,” Silverglade said. “I was in boxing for about eight years prior to that, so I’m touching like 50 years in boxing at this point. This has been approached numerous times. People will say, promoters should pay a certain percentage of every fight and set it aside to care for the fighters later. I remember about 40 years ago I went to Bob Arum, went to Don King, went to everybody promoting the main events. I said, you’re making money, so why don’t you chip in? To a man, everyone said, 'Yeah, great idea.' Not one gave a penny.”

The counterargument used against fighters like Hardy is the same as it’s ever been. You signed the contracts. You knew the risks. No one gets into boxing thinking it will be good for the human brain. You should have managed your money better when you were making it.

And sure, Silverglade said, there’s something to this. Boxing contracts don’t offer ongoing care of any kind. Fighters know this and still sign.

“Is there a legal obligation for anyone to help Heather now? No, there isn’t,” Silverglade said. “But there is a certain moral obligation. Then again, most people in boxing, including the promoters, don't make a lot of money. If you're a small-time promoter, you're lucky if you're breaking even. That’s a good night for a lot of them. Even larger promoters like Lou, they get one or two champions. They make some money on it, but the vast majority of his fighters aren't making money for him.”

This is shallow comfort for Hardy. It would be easier to understand, she said, if she’d never been any good at boxing. But she won world titles. She lost only three professional fights in a boxing career that spanned 11 years. In almost any objective sense, her career was a success.

“I’m not nobody,” she said. “I won a world title as a female on HBO in Madison Square Garden, right? I did an exceptional thing. So why is it that I'm falling down the stairs at the train station and no one's helping me?”

The fact that the question has been asked by other fighters before her, and without any clear response, is itself a form of an answer.