There will be no gold watch, no retirement roast. There will only be, in Anthony Smith’s words, “a giant Chinese dude trying to beat the shit out of me.”
When that ends, there will be the ceremonial dropping of the gloves in the center of the Octagon to mark the end of an extraordinary MMA career.
Such is life in the most brutal of all sports.
In team sports, retirements often lead to season-long goodbyes, in which gifts are bestowed in city after city and applause rains down in waves from even the harshest fans.
In the UFC, it’s a couple of shots to the face, some kicks to the legs, the dropping of the gloves and a few minutes of reminiscing on the microphone.
His life story reads like a movie script that got tossed for being too unbelievable. Near-death experiences. Horrible injuries. The loss of so many close and dear to him. And the normal ups-and-downs of a long, punishing career. On Saturday at the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Smith’s long and winding road will end with a 60th professional fight.
The challenge won’t be easy. He’ll face Mingyang Zhang, who has won 11 fights in a row, all by first-round finish. All 18 of Zhang's pro wins have ended in the first round.
Smith has never ducked anyone. His résumé is littered with the best of his era. Even on the way out, he’s fighting a killer, a guy unknown to many but one who is supremely dangerous.
Zhang lacks the name recognition of Rashad Evans, Magomed Ankalaev or the great Jon Jones. He’s hardly a gimme, though, even if his name evokes shrugs and unknowing looks from most fans.
“I’m happy that he’s as tough as he is, because I would have felt weird coming in here fighting the ghost of somebody else,” Smith said. “I didn’t want an easy fight. I never asked for an easy fight.”
He never asked for an easy fight, nor did he get an easy life.
It almost ended before it even fully started. He was 20, 5-4 and struggling to find his way as a fighter.
He wasn’t a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He wasn’t the guy who knocked out two UFC Hall of Famers, fought Jones for the title and faced five different champions across his career.
Smith was drinking and driving and rammed his car into the side of a house. He woke up on life support, not clear there’d ever be another walk to the ring or the decades we all mistakenly believe in our youth are promised to us.
Smith understands that better than most. At just 36, he’s dealt with more tragedy than most do in a lifetime.
In 2022, he fought Ankalaev just two months after the passing of his mother, Dixie Jean Tonacchio.
Stephen R. Sylvanie/Imagn Images
Anthony Smith is 38-21 heading into his final MMA fight on Saturday against Mingyang Zhang in Kansas City.
Smith broke his ankle during the Ankalaev fight, a bad injury but not one that threatens to take a young, healthy life. But Smith stared down death in the aftermath.
He worked his TV gig in the weeks immediately after the ankle surgery. He had an anaphylactic reaction to the antibiotics that nearly wound up killing him, but he flew to Paris for another TV assignment. Without his medications, he developed a potentially fatal blood clot.
“I was in the hospital until 4 or 5 in the morning the day of leaving to go to Paris,” Smith told me in 2023. “I was losing my airway. It was terrible. Early that afternoon, I flew to Paris on no blood thinners and no antibiotics. That's probably where the blood clot came.
“And once I had the blood clot, I was forced to sit down. I couldn't travel. I couldn't do anything I like to do and I couldn't do anything with physical contact for four months because of all of the blood thinners I was doing. I was doing injections in my stomach twice a day. It was a whole ordeal.”
Life has thrown Smith to the wolves more often than it has allowed him to relax. He had a man break into his home that he had to fight off. He buried both of his parents in the last four years. He lost his grandparents. His beloved coach and friend died a month before his bout with Dominick Reyes in December and he still went through with the fight.
There’s a good reason this guy is nicknamed “Lionheart.”
As he’s done the media retirement tour, he’s been asked the same question repeatedly: How do you wish to be remembered? He didn’t talk about his great victories or his ridiculous toughness.
“I’ve kind of answered that question the same way all leading up to this,” Smith said. “It’s just my effort. I tried so f*cking hard. Whether you sit at home and you’re the couch quarterback who says, ‘Well, this is what I would have done,’ I f*cking tried really hard. I tried really hard. I’ve never been the best athlete in the world. Never been the best striker. Never been the best grappler or the best wrestler. No one has ever said that.
“But I made it to the very peak in this sport. [I did it] with good, old-fashioned try hard.”
It’s why he overcame broken bones and car wrecks and concussions and staph infections and blood clots and personal losses and so much more. Yeah, maybe he was lacking this, that or the other thing that could have propelled him to the title, the one goal he could not reach.
With Smith, though, the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
He'll continue his television career, where he's quietly become one of the UFC's best analysts. It's not easy work, but then again, nothing in Smith's life has been. And nothing will stop him now.
Truly, a Lionheart.