It worked. Matias never settled. Smith controlled the chaos and finished him in five. That night belongs to him. But it also left a question that doesn’t disappear just because a belt changed hands.
That approach is built to blunt pressure fighters. It is not built to chase potshot boxers who refuse exchanges. Fighters like Teofimo Lopez, Shakur Stevenson, or Richardson Hitchins do not walk into clinches or empty the tank trying to overwhelm you. They make you reach. They make you miss. They make you work at a pace that exposes conditioning rather than hides it.
Smith says he will be ringside at Madison Square Garden later this month, watching Lopez and Stevenson with interest.
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” Smith told The Ring. “Even as a fan, I’ll be watching it. This is one I’ll be keeping my eye on now.”
Being present is easy. Forcing a unification is harder. The politics are obvious. The styles are worse. There is no clinch heavy escape route against fighters who are happy to win rounds from the outside and make you reset over and over.
Smith also said he believes he belongs in those fights. That belief is earned to a point. He took a risk against Matias that others avoided. He won it cleanly. But the jump from surviving pressure to solving elite movers is not automatic, and belts do not close that gap on their own.
Right now, Smith has leverage because he is new and interesting. He also has exposure because his last fight showed exactly how he survives when the pace rises. If a unification happens, it won’t be decided by power or grit. It will be decided by whether Smith can hold form without holding on.
