MMA Fighter Calls UFC Legend Matt Hughes Sociopath 'Piece of S#!+' for Hunting

MMA Fighter Calls UFC Legend Matt Hughes Sociopath 'Piece of S#!+' for Hunting

Matt Hughes owns victories over cage-fighting legends Royce Gracie, Georges St. Pierre, B.J. Penn, Sean Sherk, and Matt Serra. Dan Hardy occupies a lower place on the mixed-martial-arts foodchain, which might explain his spirited defense of zebras, lions, elephants, and other potential targets of big-game-hunter Hughes.

The cherry-red-headed, faux-hawked Brit tweeted “that man is a real piece of s#!+” about Hughes when he discovered the former UFC welterweight champion’s latest venture.

Uncaged with Matt Hughes debuts on The Sportsman Channel on Saturday, October 18. The show depicts the 45-9 retired cage fighter’s two-week trip to Namibia, where he hunted big game on safari. Hughes’s prey, presumably, end up appearing in a state of consciousness not wholly dissimilar to Carlos Newton’s after the UFC champ slammed famously his head to the mat.

Dan Hardy won’t be watching, or TiVoing, the four-episode series.

Hardy’s recent comments reignite a controversy started several years back when he challenged Hughes to a fight and used his sportsman pastimes as a point of ridicule. “As a person, I’ve got nothing to learn from him,” he told Ariel Helwani in 2013. “In my thirty years, I’ve already achieved more as a person than he has his whole life. I just don’t like the guy.”

This may be because he’s just not like the guy. Hughes is a little bit country. Hardy’s a little bit rock ‘n’ roll. The American welterweight likes the fight on the ground. The British welterweight keeps the fight on the feet. The champ is a born-again Christian. The contender is an evangelical atheist. 

Several years back, fight fans figured Hardy invoked Hughes’s hunting as a way to make his name by defeating a beatable, aging legend. But with Hughes retired and Hardy sidelined for the past two years with a heart condition, the authenticity of the Brit’s criticism can’t be dismissed so easily. 

“You don’t shoot animals for fun,” Hardy said of Hughes in early 2013. “What kind of person does that? Shooting animals is not fun. And somebody that finds fun out of shooting animals is a sociopath.”

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