Athletes
Cameron Smotherman | Seizing The Moment
After Receiving A Last-Minute Call To Fight In The Octagon, Cameron Smotherman Capitalized On The Opportunity To Prove He's Ready For The Big Stage
Every short notice fight is tough. There are flights to catch, weight to make, and a game plan to formulate.
Cameron Smotherman said, “Hold my beer.”
In Saudi Arabia to corner his teammate Raufeon Stots, the Texan got a call in the middle of the night on Tuesday of fight week and was asked if he was willing to fight in the UFC…that Saturday…in Las Vegas.
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“I was like, all right, I'm in,” said Smotherman, who got on a plane with 20 pounds to cut in order to make weight for a bantamweight fight with Jake Hadley.
“I want to say it took me 20 hours to get to Vegas,” he said. “I couldn't eat on the plane, I couldn't drink any water or anything. So, I think by the time I landed, I want to say, because I lost the day, I hadn't eaten in almost 48 hours or something. It was rough.”
Must be something about having those three letters on your gloves.
“I figured if I said ‘no’ this time, I wasn't going to get another chance,” Smotherman said. “So the opportunity it presented, I couldn't afford to say ‘no’ because I would've hated myself forever if I never got another chance.”
The 27-year-old had won three in a row, with two finishes, since a 2023 loss to Charalampos Grigoriou on Dana White’s Contender Series, so he was likely to get a call to the big show even if he understandably turned down a fight on less than a week’s notice half a world away. But fighters think differently than us civilians, so Smotherman flew into Vegas like this was his last shot.
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When he landed, it was Wednesday night. On Friday, he made weight at 135.5 pounds. On Saturday, he beat the heavily favored Hadley by unanimous decision.
Cameron Smotherman was a UFC fighter.
“I’ve been trying to think about how it feels, and I don't know,” he laughs. “It feels almost like a dream, kind of not real, but also feels just really normal.”
It was a lot to deal with, to say the least, in a short amount of time, and after the whirlwind of the previous few days, everything started to sink in when Paul Felder interviewed him in the Octagon after the Hadley fight.
“It just felt like a fight, but once I was doing the post-fight interview with Paul Felder, it was hitting me,” said Smotherman. “I was like, ‘Oh s**t, I'm in the UFC cage.’ I've been cornering Adrian (Yanez) for years now, but it's always for Adrian. But then it was like, this is for me. My family's here, these people are here for me, Adrian's here for me, and it was just like everything was hitting me at once, so it was a great feeling.”
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Yanez, the highly regarded bantamweight prospect, seemed more excited about his teammate’s win than he gets about his own victories. Also thrilled with Smotherman’s win was one of his mentors, former UFC star Yves Edwards. It shows you that Smotherman isn’t just a talented fighter, but a good man. And the creator of “Thug Jitsu” has been a key part in the bantamweight prospect’s development as a fighter.
“I think I'm pretty good at fighting, but he (Edwards) gives me that mentor advice on how to handle my emotions when things don't go my way. He helps me find motivation and tells me to not give up when I want to, because things were looking rough a bunch of times. It’s just having someone who's been there giving me a helping hand when I needed it.”
Smotherman needed it after his one-minute TKO loss to Grigoriou, when everything came crashing down on him.
“I was doubting everything until I got the call (for the Hadley fight),” he said. “I was in a horrible spot mentally, and it was really hard on me because I felt like I had a really hard path to get to the Contender Series. I took losses, and usually they don't take guys with this many losses. I felt like all the cards were stacked against me my entire fighting journey. The only good thing about the loss was that it happened so fast that it's not like I just got beat the hell up from start to finish and dominated. I had one bad moment, and that moment cost me a lot, but it was like, okay, well, at least I know I'm still good. But all the fights that I took since then, I was just doing them. I wasn't really all-in mentally. I was showing up for the practices and I was in shape, but I know that I wasn't the same mentally. I didn't really care.”
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The 12-4 prospect did pretty well for going through the motions, and earlier this year, he started to get his mojo back. A camp in Las Vegas working with featherweight contender Diego Lopes led to some deep conversations about the business and about making it against the odds.
“The first phase when I stopped being super depressed and super negative was when I spent about six weeks in Vegas helping Diego Lopes for his fight against Sodiq Yusuff. I was talking to him, getting to know him, and he was telling me his story. I'm like, ‘Damn, yours is even worse than mine. And you made it.”
A week after Lopes beat Yusuff at UFC 300, Smotherman won a decision over Ryan Kuse. Three months later, he submitted Ryan Mondala. And it was during that fight week that the Houston native broke out of his funk for good.
“I just need to enjoy the journey,” he said. “Don't get so hung up on the destination. And then it just hit me one day. I'm like, you know what? I guess I am kind of living my dream.”
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And he’s not going anywhere.
“I think what made it so hard is I felt like I belonged for a couple years, but now, I feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be,” Smotherman said. “Now the motivation is, all right, now I got to stay. Now I got to at least get to a second contract. I don't want to be one of those guys that just come and go. I don't want to fizzle out. I want to actually do something and really change my life forever.”
