“I just didn’t have another choice,” Smith said. “Doing it my way wasn’t working. I was a year in and I wasn’t any better at the end of the year than I was at the beginning. So that was really my only option. I’m one of those guys that always did it my way and I never gave a s**t too much about what people think about me. And honestly, everyone that I’m around – the circle I’m surrounded by – they were all super supportive of it, so fortunately I didn’t have to deal with too much. But it was a year of trying to suck it up and I was just miserable, so I didn’t have a choice.”
The willingness to seek help shows the maturity of the 32-year-old father of three, something he admits wasn’t always the case.
“So many things piled on and I just wasn’t dealing with them well, and that’s how I’ve always been, even as a young kid,” he said. “I never dealt with anything. I’m the guy who’s always okay, there’s nothing ever wrong, I’ll handle it. And eventually that cup gets too full, and it overflows.”
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And from the third round of the Teixeira fight on, Smith knew things were going south.
“I lost the Glover fight and then it just kept spiraling,” he said. “And then I lost the Rakic fight, and the worst part is neither one of those guys is better than me. Do they do things that are better than me? For sure. But if you look at the first two rounds of the Glover fight, that’s who I am and it wasn’t even close. And then you lose and you feel so stupid. The Rakic fight, I watch that guy fight and there’s not anything he does that’s impressive to me and then I lose to him. It’s a spiral. It’s one thing to sit back and let the dust settle; but to put any kind of work into fixing whatever’s going on in your head is a different thing.”
So he did it, and he was happy again. And ready to punch somebody in the face. That somebody was Devin Clark. It was the kind of fight Smith probably needed, a low-key return on the undercard of the November 28 bout between Derrick Lewis and Curtis Blaydes. But then that main event was scrapped, and soon Smith was in his seventh consecutive main event. Low-key was now out the window, but “Lionheart” didn’t care.
