With the Ultimate Fighting Championship in Seattle for a series of bouts at KeyArena, one of the sport’s stars made a visit to Capitol Hill’s Lake View Cemetery to pay his respects to another ultimate fighter, Bruce Lee. Here’s the story from our citywide news partner, the Seattle Times:
UFC fighter Dan Hardy finds inspiration at Bruce Lee’s grave
Dan Hardy was caught by an emotional punch he didn’t see coming.The Englishman who dyes his Mohawk red and bears the nickname “The Outlaw” was at Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon, seated in front of the grave of Bruce Lee.
“I owe him a lot,” Hardy said.
He stopped, clenched his jaw and waited to keep the tears from overflowing.
“He helped a lot through my journey here,” Hardy said.
Turns out there is a soulful side to fighting, one that Hardy embodies quite poignantly. He spent years taking martial arts classes as a kid. He traveled to Northern China to train for two months with Shaolin monks at the age of 20. And on Thursday he went to the grave of one of the most famous martial artists and by chance met Lee’s close friend, Taky Kimura.
The result was an afternoon that was unexpectedly moving for Hardy.
“I don’t want this to sound disrespectful,” he said. “I kind of treated it as a bit of a sightseeing kind of thing, to see Bruce Lee’s grave. But to be here, I kind of got something else from it.”
