Anthony Smith Relishes Taking One Fight At A Time

The self-effacing Smith can’t be described as being “not good,” not when you’re the 10th ranked light heavyweight in the UFC, a former world title challenger, and a staple in main events and on main cards. If you’ve done it as long as “Lionheart” has at the elite level, you’re good. But there is something to be taken away from his grandfather’s words that he has applied to his fighting career, and that’s when you’re not the fastest, biggest, strongest or best one in the Octagon, be mean, keep trying hard, and throw even harder.

That’s gotten Smith out of a lot of jams over the course of a 57-fight career that continues on Saturday night in Las Vegas with a UFC 303 bout against Roman Dolidze, and it’s allowed him to put his fighting life in perspective. There’s no more over analysis, MMA math equations or wondering what it will take to put him back in a title fight.  

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“Now I feel like I'm in this regional scene mindset,” Smith said. “When I was on the regional scene, I was so broke and so hungry and just needed it so bad that I would have to fight every month or every other month just to make ends meet and just to eat. So I’d fight and I'd have to be back in the gym in a week because I couldn't let myself get out of shape because I was going to have to fight in a month or six weeks. And now I'm kind of in that same mindset, I'm just not always fighting. So that's how I feel. I’m in shape. My weight's low. I feel good. I'm happy. This fight pops up, I just grind it out for two weeks and then go back to what I'm doing. I'm like a troll. (Laughs) I just come out of my hole. I do my thing, and then I'll crawl back into my hole.”

“I couldn't really come up with a reason not to take the fight, if I'm being honest,” he said when initially called to face Ulberg. “I'm in shape, I've been training, and I never really stopped training after Brazil. I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let myself get so out of shape and overweight in between fights anymore because honestly, I'm just getting older and it's getting harder to get back into shape. It's just easier just to stay in it. So I made a promise to myself I was going to do that.”

Then everything turned upside down, but while most things in the fight game are unpredictable, Smith is very predictable, at least in his approach to the sport.

“I've always been mentally willing,” he said of taking the short notice assignment. “If I can fight, it's not that big of a deal to me. Everyone else makes this seem like it's rocket science. It's not. You just go in and you fight and the chips fall where they fall.”

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I tell him that he’s in a select group who feels that way. He replies that the generation he came up in made it a point to always say yes when the phone rang with a fight. As for anyone else, he’s baffled.

“I've never understood why,” Smith said. “I don't have an answer for you because I don't know any other way. I don't know why these guys do this the way they do it. I don't know why they're always acting so scared all the time. I don't know why there's no more tough guys left. I don't know why. So I can't understand it because I don't operate the way that they operate.”

Remember the last time he was preparing for a trip to the Octagon? I called Smith “the last fighter.” 

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That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

“I put it (this fight) into a box and I'm not thinking about the consequences,” he said. “I'm not thinking about the rewards. None of that really matters. It's just one fight at a time for me. So, as cliche as that sounds, it's the truth. I feel good, I'm in a really good place mentally, and I'm willing to check out of my summer for a couple of weeks. I'll go there, I'll fight, I'll give it everything, and then you can catch me back at the pool.”