This feature is part of The Athletic’s series on one-hit wonders throughout sports.

In retrospect, Colton Smith was thrown to the wolves. He had just three pro fights and a handful of ammy bouts to his name back in 2012, when he punched his way onto “The Ultimate Fighter 16.” The fact that he was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army wasn’t insignificant, either. His busy schedule meant he trained half as much all the other welterweights in the house that season heading in.

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Yet a funny thing happened. Smith, who wrestled at Ankeny High School in his native Iowa, beat Jesse Barrett to get into the house. You might remember this was the season that Roy Nelson and Shane Carwin acted as the coaches, and Smith ended up on Nelson’s team. He then was paired against Eddy Ellis, a far more seasoned fighter than Smith who had 24 pro bouts on his record at that point, and won that fight, too.

Somehow, he kept winning. He next beat Jackson Wink MMA Academy fighter Igor Araujo. Smith’s wrestling was on point. He was dogged in there, a grinder — a bad matchup for stylish strikers. With actual experience in real combat, he was fearless in the cage. He kept rolling. He beat Jon Manley in the semifinals. Improbably, the soldier Smith, who began dabbling in MMA on a lark, found himself in the “TUF 16” tournament final against Mike Ricci, a considerable favorite to win the whole thing.

Well, he beat him too. From out of nowhere, Colton Smith made his name by surviving a 32-man pool, and he looked poised to make some noise in the UFC.

“You’ve got to think about it, that was the first time — really, probably the only time — I could say in my career where I legitimately had nothing else to be concerned with but training and fighting and learning,” he told The Athletic. “Let’s face it, I was drinking from a firehose.

“But it got to the point where I started realizing that some of these guys maybe weren’t brought into the system with the other coaches or they kind of thought they knew what they were doing. I’d say ignorance was kind of bliss for me. I was like, who am I to question these world-class fighters, these coaches that are on my team or coaching my team? I’m nobody. I’ve got a handful of pro fights, and I’m a part-time fighter. When I say part-time, I moonlighted as a fighter maybe twice a week at the time.”

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Smith’s victory over Ricci signaled his arrival. Not only did he win the omnipresent “six-figure contract” with the UFC, but he also took home a beautiful 2013 Harley-Davidson Street Glide — the extra little dangling carrot for that season’s winner. He still has the bike to this day, which he cherishes like a mobile trophy. In fact, a year after he won the bike, he rode out to Sturgis in the Black Hills of South Dakota, to “break it in proper” and be part of the annual motorcycle rally.

“To me, it’s like an NCAA medal or a UFC title,” he says.

Then another strange thing happened — or maybe not so much strange as unfortunate, or even inevitable. Smith was integrated with the general pool of welterweights, and the first fight the UFC offered him was a doozy. It was against Robert Whittaker, the recent winner of “TUF: The Smashes.” Not knowing anything about Whittaker — who of course went on to become UFC middleweight champion a few years later — Smith signed on right away.

He was riding a wave of success and didn’t see any reason not to.

“I didn’t realize at the time you could pick a fight or you could say, like, ‘No, I don’t want to fight that guy,'” he says. “So they called me two months after I win ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ and they’re like hey, you want to fight this other ‘Ultimate Fighter’ winner from Australia? I’m at the Arnold Classic. I was getting an award from Arnold Schwarzenegger called the ‘Out of the Ring Award’ at the time, and said yes right away. They were like, ‘Well, you might want to talk it over with your manager,’ and I’m like, ‘No, who do I got to talk to? You’re offering me a fight. I’m not going to say no.'”

He says now he’d wished he had somebody to tell him to pump the brakes and give him some time to add some skills around his wrestling base.

“It’s funny watching that Whittaker fight,” he says. “I knocked him down in the first round or second round, whatever it was, and I almost finished him. I was stupid. I made an amateur mistake. I knocked him down, and it was the first time ever in his career to get knocked down. But instead of following up with punches, I jump on a kimura. He’s flat on his face, turtled up, reaching out for my leg, and I jump on a kimura and try to finish him there. He ended up getting out of it.”

Whittaker finished Smith early in the third round via TKO, a fight that ultimately exposed some deficiencies in his standup game.

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And the UFC didn’t do Smith any favors when he decided to drop to lightweight for his next fight, either, which came against the neck hunter, Michael Chiesa. That fight was meaningful, as it was a Fight For the Troops card in Kentucky at Fort Campbell. There’s an old saying that regrets have stayed in business a long time, and once again Smith had a few for what happened in front of his fellow servicemen and women.

After surviving a scare when Chiesa had his back and full body lock midway through the first round, Smith brought the soldiers out of their seats when he turned the tables later in that same round. He ended up getting Chiesa’s back and sank a choke — a deep choke, a choke that looked like the end — as the round was winding down. Chiesa survived, and then tapped Smith out in the second.

“I remember thinking in the cage, too, I had one hook on him and I was going for the choke and I’m like, you know what — I’ll finish him here,” Smith says. “And then he ends up with a last-ditch effort, drops his head to the mat. I fall off his back, and the round expires. The next round he comes out, takes my back and chokes me.”

His final fight in the UFC came against newcomer Diego Ferreira, a fighter he was familiar with from grappling competitions earlier in his career. He says that’s the one that sticks with him the most all these years later.

“That’s probably the fight that I trained the most for that I’ve ever had,” he says, having spent his camp in Albuquerque training with Donald Cerrone, Tim Kennedy and the rest of the Jackson-Wink crew. “And man did I fight just terribly. I mean, I walked out there and basically lost in the first minute.”

(Thirty-eight seconds, if we’re counting.)

“And that’s when I realized it had to have been a mental block because for that camp, I was training with a lot of high-level guys. I was taking leave and getting passes to go out to Albuquerque, and I felt great. I was running in the mountains. I mean, I was in the best shape of my life.

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“Man, that’s the one fight that I wish I could have back. Just mentally, I wasn’t present. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why. I just wasn’t awake, wasn’t alert.”

So what became of Smith after his fast start and subsequent fizzle out? He rattled off four straight wins outside of the UFC, including a bout against Washington Da Silva with World Series of Fighting. In that one, he suspects he foiled a setup where he was being brought in to lose. He last fought in March 2018, against Sean Brady, a fight he lost via unanimous decision. Brady, it might be added, is currently 2-0 in his UFC career.

These days 32-year-old Smith — who is now in his 15th year of active military and a father of three — is running his own gym in Stafford, Va., called the Enlisted Nine Company. It opened in March, just in time to temporarily shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He says he has fallen in love with coaching and foresees a long future in it.

“I’ve been teaching on Quantico, the Marine Corps base here, and up at the Pentagon for the past couple years before I opened up,” he says. “I’ve had a pretty large following before I even opened up the actual brick and mortar out of the population. So yeah, Enlisted Nine, that’s our banner, that’s what we fight under. A lot of people who train with me are transient because they’re here for military training or they’re here for military school. They’re stationed here and they move on. That’s the nature of the beast of the military.”

In the meantime, he’s on the verge of getting his Bachelor of Science in Health and Wellness from Purdue University. He still has the Harley-Davidson Street Glide, and he still gets it out as often as can. That’s the constant reminder of those weeks he spent beating guys in a series of televised exhibitions back in 2012, when he became “The Ultimate Fighter.” Every time he starts it up, he remembers when he kick-started his career.

Not that it’s over. Smith says he’s a free agent, and he’s been spending the time he didn’t take after winning “TUF 16” to get better in all aspects of a cage fight.

“I’ve really come back to the base martial arts and what got me to love MMA as a whole, doing strict Thai boxing, doing strict jiu-jitsu, doing strict wrestling, boxing,” he says. “Now the ability to incorporate those and be a lot calmer in there — to really focus in on the techniques and stuff — I think I’ll be a lot more of a cerebral fighter next time around.

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“Whenever that time does come — if it does come — then I’ll knock it out.”

(Top photo: Ed Mulholland / Zuffa)