Anthony Smith opened up on why he flipped off the fan after his UFC Kansas City loss.
Smith was set for his retirement fight against Mingyang Zhang. ‘Lionheart’ entered the bout as a sizeable underdog, and he suffered a first-round TKO loss. After the loss, while the doctors were attending to him in the Octagon, he was flipping someone off and he revealed it was a fan.
“There was a guy in a Nebraska shirt and he was like booing me and flipping me off and kind of talking trash before the fight,” Anthony Smith said on the UFC post-fight show, via MMANews. “But I was really focused on what I had to do. Then after the fight, his friend is cheering and he’s still flipping me off and saying some pretty disrespectful things.
“I was so mad. He was wearing a Nebraska shirt! We’re supposed to be family here. It’s not a very big community of people here,” Smith continued. “Mingyang is like, ‘Don’t do this brother, you’ve got to quit that.’ Listen, I was emotional,” Smith added. “The fight didn’t go the way I wanted it to go. That is what it is. That’s just part of the game… If you’re sitting in the crowd, you’re definitely not doing what I’m doing, especially wearing a Nebraska shirt. You can’t talk trash wearing a Nebraska shirt! Like, come on now!”
Anthony Smith wasn’t happy that someone wearing a Nebraska shirt was talking trash about him. Of course, Smith lives in Nebraska, so he was frustrated that someone wearing a Nebraska shirt would be cheering against him, especially in his retirement fight.
