As the wins kept piling up, Anthony Smith ignored the signs that something was very, very wrong with his body in the lead-up to his fights.
With 40 fights under his belt, and age 30 just around the corner, cutting weight was not getting any easier for the 6-foot-4 Smith ahead of his encounter with Thiago Santos in Belem, Brazil in February. Though he’d made the 185-pound limit countless times, scary symptoms were starting to pop up that should have told Smith to move up a division a long time ago.
But he kept getting away with it.