Heather Hardy Brings The Heat To Nydia Feliciano In Brooklyn

Photos by Sue Jaye Johnson

by Sarah Deming

BROOKLYN, N.Y.–I had planned to hunker down Friday night and pre-toxify for my trip to Amsterdam, but when I heard that junior featherweights Heather “The Heat” Hardy and Nydia “Phenomenal” Feliciano were doing battle at the Aviator, I couldn’t stay home.

Two years ago, I saw Nydia Feliciano spar a woman called Fire in a gym in Inwood. Fire was slick, but she couldn’t get her distance on Feliciano, whose soft body held surprising strength. I still remember the knowing way Feliciano placed her shots, chipping away at Fire’s body like a sculptor who sees something in a stone.

Feliciano has been pro longer than Heather Hardy has been boxing. Hardy has amassed an 8-0 record and become one of the favorites at promoter Lou Dibella’s Broadway Boxing shows, but nobody had ever accused her of finesse. I was surprised she had taken a fight with such a tough opponent.

On the bus ride to the godforsaken corner of Brooklyn that holds the Aviator Sports and Events Center, I ran into the ubiquitous Diablo, who said he was cornering Feliciano. Diablo is about 4’10” and looks like a Dominican Yosemite Sam. He once tried to have me ejected from a Golden Gloves show for no apparent reason.

“Is Nydia in shape?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “She’s been training.”

I told him I thought she was a good boxer, better than her record of 7-4-3 would indicate.

“Discipline wins fights,” said Diablo. “It doesn’t matter how good you box.”

Feliciano took the ring first. She looked shinier than the ring card girls in trunks of baby blue and silver sequins. The Galeano men were carrying her belts, which were more feminine in silhouette than men’s belts and had even less meaning. They were not at stake in this eight-rounder, which she had taken on three weeks notice.

The Heat looked grim by comparison in her plain white robe. She gazed into the opposite corner with an intensity that was almost frightening, and for a moment I imagined it was not Heather Hardy’s face staring out from beneath the white hood but her bare skull.

From the opening bell, Hardy was the aggressor, which came as no surprise. In the second round, Feliciano caught and countered Hardy’s hooking right, but she was not in condition to fight for the whole two minutes. This would become a theme: Feliciano fighting in spurts, Hardy with unrelenting aggression.

The sparse crowd was all for the Heat, who has to sell as many as 150 tickets for each show. Male boxers don’t have the same quota, but she isn’t complaining.

“Boxing is a business,” Hardy says. “Lou Dibella doesn’t owe me anything.”

Her friends and boxing students were screaming every time she threw a punch, and she was always throwing a punch. Although Feliciano had some slick moments in the third and fourth, she had little answer for the sheer volume of Hardy’s output.

Hardy’s nose bled softly throughout the fifth, which was her best round yet. It was the first time I had ever seen her display lateral movement or seem to evade punches on purpose. The skull-like game face reappeared, her jaw gripping the mouthpiece and her eyes wide open as she tried new things.

Perhaps because she was unafraid to appear grotesque, Hardy began to seem beautiful to me. I admired the muscles of her hamstrings beneath the scanty miniskirt, the halo of yellow hair escaping her braids.

I admired the devotion that had gone into her training, the accretion of daily drills. I had gone in expecting to see Hardy exposed, but she was doing the exposing. This reversal made me think of a line of a Kay Ryan poem: “In time’s fullness, the diamonds of patience couldn’t be distinguished from the genuine in brilliance or hardness.”

Women’s boxing is a small pie cut into very few slices, which breeds a lot of hungry haters. Hardy feels the heat and fires back the only way she knows how, by training harder.

“If I can do it, anyone can,” Hardy says. “I’ve been training while I lost my house, twice, while I raised my nine-year-old daughter by myself, while I worked full-time. When people want what I’ve got, I say, ‘Work as hard as I do, and come take it.’”