Jimmy Smith is returning to the broadcast position for Bellator MMA for the first time in over six years beginning with the June 22 event in Dublin, Ireland.
Damon Martin of MMA Fighting first reported the news. Smith will be joining Sean O'Connell and Dan Hardy on the headset.
This will be the first time since 2017 that Smith calls the action for Bellator. In the interim, he worked for UFC and was the main play-by-play analyst on WWE Raw for a brief time beginning in 2021.
“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.”
The card will be headlined by Jason Jackson facing off against Ramazaan Kuramagomedov in a welterweight fight. The fight can be seen on the Max streaming service on June 22.
Stick with Fightful MMA for the latest in Mixed Martial Arts news
