As Anthony Smith, Jose Aldo and others across MMA near the end of the road, when's the right time to leave your gloves in the Octagon?
fight for the last 17 years, but on Dec. 9 in Las Vegas, he was certain that he never wanted to do it again.The end came in Round 3, when Rountree landed a left hook that sent Smith reeling to the canvas so awkwardly, that Rountree refrained from throwing another shot even though the referee hadn't yet waved him off. Morton, Smith's longtime jiu-jitsu coach, accompanied Smith to the back, sat with him as he went through medicals and then broke into tears.
Smith's head coach, Marc Montoya, calls it the fighter"conundrum," and he's watched it play out over and over as a coach of the last 16 years. Smith is still ranked and still younger than three of the past five men to have won a light heavyweight championship for the first time -- including the current champ,He has also been on the wrong end of some memorably vicious losses in recent years.
Anthony Smith resides in Omaha, Nebraska, but during fight camps, he travels to the Denver suburb of Englewood in Colorado to train weekly before returning to his family on the weekend. , but his camps take place at Factory X in Englewood, Colorado. During camp, he stays in Colorado throughout the week, and flies home to be with his family every weekend.
He wonders how his daughters will feel about that once they've grown. What those conversations will be like. "One of the reasons these guys become good humans is they find an outlet in fighting that if they didn't have, they would be in massive trouble," Montoya said."Prison, death, drugs, all of the above. It's scary to them to take away the one thing that was able to put them on the right track. Their two most powerful dealing with taking that away are time and patience.
A lot of walls have fallen down for Smith in the past 17 years. He really has built an entire life for himself by simply refusing to go away. It's one of the trademarks of his career. But what happens when the walls stop falling? If he wins but doesn't look like himself, there will be a conversation. If he loses but performs well, there will be a different conversation. If he loses badly, there might be a difficult conversation.
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