Last September, after a long wait, Harry Hardwick finally got the call he had been fighting for. The UFC had a short notice opportunity to fight at UFC Paris and wanted him to step in against Kauê Fernandes at lightweight with only a few days notice. While he had to go through a whole rigamarole of tests and media, Hardwick said he still felt physically prepared to do the dance.
“Thankfully didn’t have to cut to featherweight. And then the actual fight itself was just, there wasn’t a lot of time to dial a plan in. So it was just kind of like, right, well, we’ll just make it a scrap,” Hardwick said. “I’m always in shape for three rounds.”
However, after just one kick, things changed. Fernandes, known for his low kicks, landed early and that changed things pretty quickly.
“If I can just get after him, I can put hands on his face and start punching him in the body and clinching him and doing this kind of stuff. I can kind of try my best to mitigate his very tidy outside fighting game,” he said. “That didn’t work. Every time I stepped in and put weight on my lead leg, it just got blasted. And they were very unusual kicks.”
Those kicks were so unusual that Hardwick was left with a little momento of the fight, that he’ll carry with him into this one.
“It’s hard to describe, and I’ve not really experienced anything before or since, but I did check the first one and I’ve still got a lump on my shin,” Hardwick explained. “The lump doesn’t hurt and it’s probably an advantage. Now I’ve got like a little hard calcified lump on the top of my left shin, but yeah, it was a bit of a mad one.”
With that experience on his back, or shin, Hardwick is excited to get a fight with a full camp at his proper weight class. He’ll get that when he fights Contender Series veteran Marwan Rahiki this Saturday.
“Obviously in the Contender Series fight, he got walloped like really bad and he did a good job of recovering,” he said. “When I hurt people, they typically don’t get that momentum back. I very rarely let people back into the fight once it starts going my way.”
You can see him look to steal that momentum as part of the UFC Vegas 114 main card. The prelims for the fight card start at 5pm EST with the main card at 9pm EST – both of which are on Paramount+.