Leland Hardy
I suppose there's only one thing you need to say about Leland Hardy. "Watch this":
...and this:
...and this:
...and this
Leland has pretty much done it all! When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, my dad used to watch him box in local arenas as an amateur. Mr. Hardy was the Pennsylvania State Heavyweight Champion back in 1983. (I think I was in the womb back then) and he just missed making it to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Unlike most fighters, though, he had a backup plan just in case he didn't make it to the Olympics. He would go to graduate school for business if he didn't make it. He didn't go to just any graduate school though; he went to the #1 graduate business school in the world, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Not only that, he became the youngest ever Fellow, and the first ever African-American Fellow at the world's #1 graduate management program of any kind, the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where you have to be totally fluent in at least one foreign language to even be considered for admission. He was fluent in two foreign languages back then, Chinese and Spanish, and is fluent in four of them now. As a high school senior he won the AATSP National Spanish Contest as the most fluent non-Hispanic Spanish speaker in the United States. His Chinese is so good that he was Muhammad Ali's Official Interpreter in China and is considered the most fluent Chinese speaking Black person in the world. He invented the concept of customized business education for professional athletes and entertainers, and the program that he created single-handedly at the Wharton School, the Business Institute for Continuing Education in Professional Sports (B.I.C.E.P.S.), is the educational program that you see all of the NFL players attending during their off-season. He has been on Wall Street for years and currently handles all of the global marketing activity for the Hennesse Group, the hedge fund industry's most established hedge fund advisory firm and hedge fund direct investment consultant. He also recently set up an off shore company, the Turks & Caicos Islands Development Group Ltd., to structure financing and investments for large scale hotel and real estate development projects in that country, which is rated as having the best beaches in the world. You might have heard about it recently because Tony Parker and Eva Longoria just had their honeymoon there. Mr. Hardy is the Founder and Original Registrant of www.NEWYORK.com, which is considered perhaps the single most valuable domain name in the world. The website offers everything you could ever want on line, from hotels in every city in the world, to travel, entertainment, theater tickets, restaurant reservations, and too many more things to list.
On top of all of that, after graduating from the Wharton School, he was a professional heavyweight fighter! He won the 1989 Madison Square Garden 'Fight of the Year' with a stunning, one-punch knockout victory over the then undefeated, 2-time New York Daily News Golden Gloves Champion, Ike Padilla. That fight went on to become immortalized as an instant classic and was selected by Boxing Scene Magazine as one of the "Top 20 Fights of the 80's". When you want the definition of a pure, one punch knockout artist, just look for Leland Hardy's picture in the dictionary. Every win he ever had was by knockout. The right uppercut with which he knocked Padilla out is considered perhaps the greatest right uppercut ever thrown. If you do an on line search for "greatest club fight of all times," you won't have to go too far below the first search result to find him.
As I move forward, deeper into the heavyweight title picture, you can rest assured that I'll be calling on Mr. Hardy's help with my becoming a devastating, one-punch KO artist like he was. And don't get it twisted; he can still do it with the best of 'em and I'd put my money on him against a lot of the top tier heavyweight out there today, especially the older guys.
Mr. Hardy handles all of my marketing and advertising affairs and works directly with both Big Rob and Rob, Jr. on my marketing strategy so that I'm associated with the right companies and organizations, like Mr. Hardy's Internet Equality project which helps make the Internet more accessible to the poor and others worldwide, and so that we're projecting the right image to young people around the world, which is super important to me. Mr. Hardy won the Advertising Age Magazine "marketing 100" Award as one of the top 100 marketers in the world in 1999-2000.
You can reach Leland at lelandhardy@fasteddiechambers.com
