“I believe that I’ll still be great, but maybe not in the same ways that I originally intended, which is kinda how things usually work for me,” he said. “I have a plan and it kinda works out, but it’s not in the way I originally intended it to. I was gonna beat Jon Jones’ record at one point. I was certain of it. And after I made it to the UFC, I ran through Alp (Ozkilic) and I was like, ‘This is it, this is my time,’ and I kinda fell flat and just took it too lightly. I regrouped, went on another run and said, ‘Okay, this will be the time for sure.’ It didn’t happen, I got choked out, kinda destroyed my psyche and now we’re here.”
Smolka’s debut against Alptekin Ozkilic was in January 2014. He lost his next bout to Chris Cariaso, then ran off four consecutive wins before going on a four-fight losing streak that began with a defeat against current flyweight champ Brandon Moreno in 2016. That losing skid ended with him getting cut by the UFC, but with three wins on the regional circuit, he returned as a bantamweight in 2018 and has won three of five bouts.
Now, every fight has that much more weight attached to it, and while Smolka is fine with the pressure that brings, he also admits that having to readjust his own expectations took some getting used to.
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“There’s a part of it that eats away at you,” he said. “After my first loss, my manager Jason (House) sent me a quote: ‘The Definition of hell is when you go back and you look at what you could have been.’ From that perspective, it’s a little bit hard to pivot and change your expectations, but you gotta be able to or else you’re delusional, and I haven’t really seen that work out well for anybody. If you’re not looking at true facts to assess your trajectory, then you’re just out of your mind already. There are some things where I am optimistic, but this is within the realm of possibility. And it is hard. It’s like ripping away a bit of what you planned, but at the same time, it’s life, and you carry on.”
That’s as honest an assessment as you will get in this, or any other, business, but that’s just the way Smolka is built.
“I just try to be objective,” he said. “The truth lies in objectivity. Honestly, our sport is really mapping uncharted ground. What we’re doing hasn’t really been done, save for like the gladiators, and I don’t think they had anywhere near the resources that we do today. So we’re pushing and we’re pioneering to new space, and I honestly think the first couple generations are gonna be critical in what our sport can become eventually. You see the era of the grapplers, and you see the strikers that are able to stop the takedown, and the jiu-jitsu guys that exploit that, and so on. But then you see everybody get more and more well-rounded so then you see the wrestle-boxers come out and the jiu-jitsu guys’ takedowns. You see all these evolutions and these guys getting better and better, but at the same time, our sport is so young, and we’ve done it with so little instruction and know how that whoever can create a roadmap for how this stuff really does work can create a universal blueprint for MMA, and that’s gonna pay big dividends, I think.”