Ray Borg hopes UFC 207 win over Louis Smolka kickstarts run to champ Demetrious Johnson

LAS VEGAS – It’s been a bizarre latter half of 2016 for Ray Borg, and he’s hoping to have a good end to the calendar year ahead of a fresh start in 2017.

Borg (9-2 MMA, 3-2 UFC) meets fellow flyweight Louis Smolka (11-2 MMA, 5-2 UFC) in tonight’s UFC 207 main-card opener at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

And though on Wednesday Borg said he was hoping for nothing bizarre to happen between then and fight time, it seems he couldn’t avoid it in full. Although his fight with Smolka will go on, it’ll happen at a catchweight of 129.5 pounds after Borg missed weight. He forfeits 30 percent of his show money to Smolka. It’s not exactly the smooth end to 2016 he was hoping for.

“It’s definitely been testing my mental strength,” Borg told MMAjunkie on Wednesday at a media day in support of UFC 207, which has prelims on FS1 and UFC Fight Pass. “It’s been a rough mid- to end-of-year, but I’m looking to turn that around quick with a win over Smolka.

“No superstitions, but I’m just making sure things play out fine,” he continued. “Crazy things can happen, but you can’t control whether it does or doesn’t happen. I have no control over what happened in Cleveland (at UFC 203). So whether things happen, whether they’re going to happen or not happen, we’ve just got to roll with it.”

After a decision loss to Justin Scoggins in February snapped a three-fight winning streak that included two fight-night bonuses, he was supposed to return in July at UFC 201. But an injury knocked him out of a fight against Fredy Serrano.

Then he was supposed to fight Ian McCall at UFC 203, but he had to pull out of the fight with an illness.

Now, for the Smolka fight, he has missed weight for the second time in three flyweight bouts.

But maybe an impressive performance against Smolka, who’s No. 14 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA flyweight rankings (Borg is No. 15), will make him – and his bosses – forget about the fight pull-outs and the weight infractions.

What he really wants is to put the kind of winning streak together that can get him in the conversation for a fight against current flyweight titleholder and pound-for-pound No. 1 Demetrious Johnson.

“It’s a big deal for me to go in there and get this win with everything that’s happened the last few months,” Borg said. “Not only that, coming off of a loss, I need to make sure I go in there and make a statement. I expect to win this fight, and after I win this fight, it puts me in a great position to start climbing the rankings again – taking these guys out one by one, taking a step up, taking a step up. And then hopefully by this time next year I’ll be fighting Demetrious.”

Check out the full interview above.

And for more on UFC 207, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.