UFC Heavyweight Antoni Hardonk stops a Robbery in Los Angeles

Published on: 2nd July, 2009

UFC Heavyweight Antoni Hardonk stops a Robbery in Los Angeles | read this item

A man and a woman were saved by UFC Heavyweight Antoni Hardonk in Los Angeles, California last month when three young men were attempting to rob the victims for their money, but it first started out with the robbers trying to take the Heavyweight’s fighter who may I add is standing in at 6′4″ and 250 pounds.

In an interview with Yahoo! Sports CageWriter blog Hardonk said that he was coming out of a recent training session near the LA International Airport and was with his attorney, Nima Safapour when three men asked if he had some money to buy some cigarettes.

“My feeling is I want to help someone if I can, so I pulled out my wallet,” Hardonk said.

However, Hardonk said he had no small bills in his wallet to spare, so he told them he could not give them anything when one of the men pulled out what appeared to be a homemade knife, but Hardonk didn’t fold under any pressure when they asked for his wallet.

“I said, ‘What? Are you crazy? I’m not giving you my wallet,’ ” Hardonk said.

So in turn, Hardonk told the young men that if they wanted his wallet then they were going to have to try and take it, but they decided to do what was best and run away from the former Kickboxer who was also a bouncer in the Netherlands.

However, Hardonk followwed the men along with his attorney in a car and saw that they were trying to rob a woman down the road, but then turned their attention to another man walking by alone which lead Hardonk to go after the three assailants and took two of them down while the third man was running away with the man’s wallet and with Hardonk in pursuit the third robber dropped the wallet and Hardonk retrieved back to the man that was beng robbed.

Hardonk’s attorney was able to then call the police as they arrived on the scene as they took their statements as to what went down, but Hardonk realizes that he should have just given the men his wallet so any further harm could not have been done.

“In a similar situation in the future, it would probably be better just to give them the money and be done with that,” he said. “Obviously, I had much better (fighting) skills, but is it worth the risk? They could have had a gun, other knives, who knows?

“But I’m stubborn. And I fight to earn my money and that’s a hard way to make a living. And I’m not just going to give it away to guys like that.”

“I believe if you can do something to help someone else, you should,” Hardonk said. “We’re all here and we should all try to help each other if we can. It’s the right thing to do. I just did what I thought was right.”

LA police told Hardonk that similar crimes have been going down in the same week and no arrests still have not been made, but it is good to know that there was a big guy like Hardonk around to help stop something that maybe could have gotten ugly, so my hats off to the current UFC Heavyweight.