UFC fighter Anthony Smith announced his fight with Zhang Mingyang at UFC Kansas City will be his last in MMA.
After many years of pushing back his retirement, 36-year-old Anthony Smith has finally decided to hang up the gloves. In an interview with MMA Fighting, Smith spoke about his struggles in coming to this decision and how the death of his longtime coach and friend, Scott Morton, made it easier.
The 36-year-old disclosed his feelings after his coach’s passing and said he had to fight a month after the funeral despite his grief. Unfortunately, he lost his fight against Dominick Reyes, but he says the loss helped him during his grieving process and was another push that made him realize retirement was around the corner.
“Once Scotty died, it made it really easy,” Smith said. “This thing is different for me now. It’s not the same. The whole process feels different. My everyday life is different with him gone. Retiring now is easy because I’m leaving something that doesn’t feel normal anyway, if that makes any sense.
“It doesn’t feel like I’m leaving something that I’ve had and been holding onto for a really long time because that thing’s already gone. So now I’m just leaving something that’s new anyway.”
“I think I needed that for my own healing,” Smith explained. “I needed to walk that path, walk that road, and just get by it. Whether I fought then or a year later, it was going to be the same. No, I don’t regret it. I felt way better the next day. Not great, there’s no real healing of getting past it, but I carried it better the next day. Maybe I’m a f*cking psychopath, but I carry it better since I got out of that octagon. Whatever I needed to exorcise or whatever, I needed to get out or beat out of me, it worked to some degree.”
Smith revealed that another reason for his decision is due to his time away from his family. The fighter explained that throughout his career, training camps and media appearances required him to spend more time in hotels, but he believes it is finally time to walk away and embrace a more homely lifestyle.
“I probably stuck around too long already, if we’re being honest,” Smith said with a laugh when speaking to MMA Fighting. “Probably since maybe the second [Ryan] Spann fight, I started telling my team, my family, and my wife that I’m having a lot of fun, but it’s just taking up a lot of time. It comes down to being a dad and being a husband and just checking into that part of my life. Not that I’m not checked in—I’m super involved with everything that goes on. I almost never miss anything. But it’d be nice to slow that part down and not have that responsibility. That’s kind of when it started.
“I kept saying three or four [more fights], and then that three or four just kept getting pushed back. I’d fight again, and it’s like three or four more, and then I’d fight again, and, oh, probably three or four [more fights]. I said that but didn’t start ticking them off. Then it just got rough. It got rough. It just started to feel like the ups and downs weren’t worth it anymore. I love the fight part of it. There’s nothing I enjoy more than walking into the octagon and fighting. It’s everything that surrounds it that I’m not as willing to do anymore.”
After the fight, Smith said he had a meeting with the UFC, where he scheduled his final appearance and thanked UFC Chief Business Officer Hunter Campbell.
“It was a good conversation,” Smith said. “Me and Hunter [Campbell] had a long talk, kind of just about life. I know that the UFC does catch a lot of shit, and you don’t read the good articles—you read a lot of the bad—but they were really, really supportive and talked to me just about how I felt, about life. What we were going to do moving forward and what I wanted that to look like.
“I definitely wanted one more. Really because I didn’t want to go out like I did the last one. I’m not even saying I need a guaranteed win. I just wanted more favorable circumstances. I wanted to know. I wanted to do it on my own terms, and they were super open and willing to make that happen and were able to get me close to home. It was a great conversation.”
Irrespective of his retirement, Smith will always remain a fixture in MMA through his work as an analyst. He says he has no plans to return to the cage after his retirement and will focus on his podcast and preparing for his last training camp.
“It’s final,” Smith said about his decision. “It’s really just because it’s not about fighting itself. It’s about everything that surrounds it that I’m just not as willing to do anymore. My kids deserve it. My children deserve not to have this thing all the time and just not have me constantly waiting on the next big thing. Really just checking into them. You have to structure your life a certain way when you live this life, and I’m ready to just not do that anymore and ready to just be as close to a normal human as I possibly can.”
