Bellator, an MMA company, was recently bought by PFL, and the new owners have been making some changes. The company retained many fighters, including Douglas Lima, Cheick Kongo, Patricio Pitbull, and many others.
In addition, Bellator has made a huge non-fighter signing by bringing on commentator Jimmy Smith. Smith initially signed with Bellator during the promotion’s second season in 2010, and he stayed until 2017 before signing a one-year deal with UFC.
After the deal ended, Smith signed on to Invicta FC and was later hired as a play-by-play commentator for WWE’s Monday Night Raw, but he soon parted ways with them. The commentator has since signed with other promotions before returning to his old territory. Smith will join the broadcast team alongside Sean O’Connell on play-by-play and analyst Dan Hardy. In an interview with MMA Fighting, Smith recounted the reunion.
“I got a phone call, ‘Hey, do you want to come do some shows for us? ’I went, ‘Sure, yeah, great, no problem.’ People have this idea that I rekindled things. It’s not like I haven’t seen Scott Coker since then. It’s not like I haven’t been in touch with Bellator people since then. I called the directors and producers. We’re friends. So every now and then, I’ll catch up, ‘How’s it going? It’s not like there was some titanic, horribly burned bridges incident that we had to overcome. It was nothing like that at all. It was simply, ‘Hey, would you like to come do some shows for us? I said, ‘Yeah, sure, I’d love to. …
“I’m thrilled that there’s enough guys, like Patricky Pitbull and Patricio and all those people that I knew a while ago, and now there’s this new crop that I didn’t get a chance to call their fights necessarily, but I’ve been looking at them, and God, they’re amazing. It’s really an incredible crop.”
“It was a surprise a little bit,” He added, “But not that much. It wasn’t like once again that we had some kind of blow up or anything like that. It had just been a long time since I worked for them.”
Smith disclosed that PFL producer and former FOX executive George Greenberg reached out to make the request. The commentator is currently exclusive to the Bellator brand, but he is optimistic and ready to work with the promotion in whatever direction it chooses to take.
“Right now it’s Bellator, they said, ‘Go overseas, do some Bellator shows over in Europe for us,’ which is great. That sounds absolutely fantastic. PFL has a big squad of commentators. I’m not saying I couldn’t fit in or do stuff for PFL. It would be no problem at all. They have their guys, it’s a packed house there.”
Smith’s first fight card with Bellator will be Bellator Champions Series 3 in June, which will feature a welterweight division title fight between Jason Jackson and Ramazan Kuramagomedov. The commentator promises to do his best and deliver an amazing performance.
“It’s not easy to make a show better with your commentary. It is easy to make it worse. It’s almost like being a referee. As long as I do my job, nobody notices me. When I f*** up, then it’s the end of the world. That’s the line you have to ride, and it’s very easy for me to make a show worse by not being prepared or bumbling something. But if I do it right, hopefully, it’s all on experience, and you don’t notice a difference. That’s my goal.”
