Jimmy Smith is coming home.
The veteran color commentator and play-by-play man is returning to call fights for Bellator MMA, starting with the upcoming show scheduled on June 22 in Dublin, Ireland. Smith previously called fights for Bellator from 2010 to 2017 before joining UFC and eventually working with WWE.
Now Smith returns to his old stomping ground to join a broadcast team that includes Sean O’Connell on play-by-play and fellow analyst Dan Hardy.
“I got a phone call,” Smith told MMA Fighting of how the reunion came together. “‘Hey, do you want to come do some shows for us?’ I went, ‘Sure, yeah, great, no problem.’ People have this idea that I rekindled things, it’s not like I haven’t seen Scott Coker since then. It’s not like I haven’t been in touch with Bellator people since then. I called the directors and producers, we’re friends. So every now and then I’ll catch up, ‘How’s it going?’ It’s not like there was some titanic, horrible burned bridges incident that we had to overcome. It was nothing like that at all. It was simply, ‘Hey, would you like to come do some shows for us?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure, I’d love to.’
“It was a surprise a little bit, but not that much. It wasn’t like once again that we had some kind of blow up or anything like that. It had just been a long time since I worked for them.”
Jimmy Smith returning to Bellator broadcast team starting with Dublin card in June - MMA Fighting
