Given his bad reputation in the past while playing in the NFL, Greg Hardy started out his career in the UFC making a conscious effort to stay humble, but after getting his first win in the UFC this past weekend at UFC Fight Night 151 it seems he’s quickly dispensed with that idea.
Instead, Hardy is now comparing himself to none other than Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson (an all-star in both Baseball and American Football).
“I’m reaching heights that I’ve never reached before,” Hardy said at the post-fight press conference on Saturday night. “I’ve been alongside titans for my whole life. Michael Orr, Greg Oden, Joakim Noah, Al Horford, I played against these guys in college. Tom Brady, Cam Newton, these guys are titans, these guys are monsters in the game. So to come over here and transition to a place where “titan” isn’t the right justification for what these guys are, it’s amazing. And I just don’t think these heights have been reached yet.
“This is gonna make Bo Jackson look like a joke. I’m the fights sports’ athlete version of what [Michael] Jordan could be. This is just getting started. We’re scratching the surface, basically.”
These kind of declorations seem somewhat hasty given that after Saturday night’s event even Dana White had to admit that hardy’s opponent, Dmitrii Smoliakov looked absolutely awful.
“I’m not gonna say that I loved that fight,” White said backstage. “You guys know, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, we don’t do set-up fights for anybody. And if I was a fan and probably some of the media, the way some of the media acts, I would think that was—I don’t know who the f*ck that guy beat in nine fights, but I’d like to see the nine guys he beat. That was weird.”
