Israel Adesanya’s post-fight antics at UFC 253 have become the stuff of MMA lore, but one person who wasn’t impressed by what went down is Dan Hardy.
The fighter and UFC color commentator calls Adesanya’s antics both crass and unnecessary.
“It was crass, is the truth,” Hardy said at a recent media scrum (via Alexander K. Lee of MMA Fighting). ”It was unnecessary and it was crass. It’s not good for the sport to be seeing those things, but at the same time we see a lot of the superstars they stand out, they create headlines because of the thing that they do. [Adesanya] was urinating on the octagon in his UFC debut. We shouldn’t be surprised by these things. There’s a lot of animosity between these guys and we do act out when we’re in these scenarios. When your adrenaline’s up, you’ve just won the fight, you’ve got all this energy. How many times do you see people doing terrible dances after fights and stuff? I’ve done it myself. You don’t know what you’re saying in interviews because your adrenaline’s going, you’re just ‘blllaaaaah!’ It happens. Sometimes it’s difficult to keep control of yourselves in those circumstances, but that’s when you see someone like that and you kind of think, well, it wasn’t in the spirit of martial arts and really that’s what we want to be seeing, to represent the sport as a whole. But ultimately, these people have to be their individual selves.”
Paulo Costa, who was the victim of the “mad humper,” vowed to get revenge on the person he has labeled “human trash.” Hardy believes the reason that Costa was so easily picked apart by Adesanya at UFC 253 was due to an issue with stamina.
“If you’re a three-round fighter and you’re fighting over five rounds, you may not be able to elevate your conditioning to five rounds,” Hardy said. “You may just have to manage that energy system. So starting hard and going fast for three rounds and then having to fight when you’re gassed and you’re trying to defend yourself against Adesanya is not the smart thing to do. So if I was in Costa’s corner I would have probably said the same thing: Take it easy the first round, don’t give him too much to search on, don’t give him too much research, don’t give him too much to kind of figure out and set you up. But unfortunately, I just don’t think that Costa had the operating system against Izzy to be able to understand what was going on when he was in the pocket.”
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