If MMA didn’t have the worst weight miss in its history Friday, it might have the one that will go down as the most memorable.
And as far as the likely overwhelming majority of MMA fans are concerned, it probably couldn’t have happened to a better candidate for mockery than Greg Hardy.
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Hardy missed weight by more than 26 pounds (H/T/ Igor Fejes) for the heavyweight co-main event at Fight Nation Championship 31, which takes place Saturday at Belgrade Arena in Serbia. Hardy weighed in at 292.3 pounds. The heavyweight limit is 265 with a 1-pound non-title allowance in MMA.
Hardy’s opponent, fellow former UFC fighter Darko Stosic (22-8), was 239.6 pounds, which will leave him at a weight disadvantage of more than 50 pounds. Still, the fight will go on, despite Hardy (8-5) blowing the weight limit out of the water in a potentially historically unprofessional way.
For context, the biggest weight miss in UFC history was by William Knight at UFC 271. He came in 12 pounds heavy for a light heavyweight bout against Maxim Grishin, then lost the next night. Some elite-level fighters have missed badly, too, like Anthony Johnson’s 11-pound miss against Vitor Belfort at UFC 142 and Charles Oliveira’s 9-pound featherweight miss before he moved to lightweight, then became champion.
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But especially at heavyweight, which has a huge spread from 206 pounds up to 265, weight misses are infrequent. So for Hardy to come in not just heavy, but 26 pounds heavy, will be hard to forget.
Hardy’s career has been littered with legal issues, domestic violence charges, drug arrests and just generally bad headlines. The former NFL Pro Bowl lineman saw his football career derail in 2014 with a domestic violence case that eventually was expunged when the alleged victim stopped cooperating – though graphic photos showed the damage Hardy did to his ex-girlfriend. The Carolina Panthers cut him loose.
He signed with the Dallas Cowboys in 2015, but was suspended to start the season. The Cowboys didn’t re-sign him after a turbulent season in which he was criticized frequently by his coaches and fellow players for his off-the-field life.
After he failed his way out of massive contracts in the NFL, he turned to MMA, where he would have to punch and kick other heavyweight men in fights, and those men would be able to punch and kick him back. The UFC signed him – because of course it did, given he was a lightning rod for controversy.
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But in his UFC debut, it was no doubt a sign of the chaos to come when he lost by DQ for an illegal knee. A few fights later, Hardy used an illegal inhaler between rounds in Boston and overturned his win to a no contest. Although he had four wins in the UFC, he lost his last three by knockout and got kicked to the curb in 2022.
This past year, he made headlines outside combat sports once again when he was arrested for domestic violence against a family member.
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: ‘Prince of War’? More like ‘King of Weight Misses,’ Greg Hardy
