Francis Ngannou’s return carries heavy weight

There was a moment during Francis Ngannou’s final fight in the UFC, as he sat on his stool between the fourth and fifth rounds against Ciryl Gane, that things came sharply into focus. In the next five minutes he would win or lose, the great either/or by which all competition is defined. His knee was compromised. It had been that way since three weeks before the fight, and everybody knew it. He was tired from 20 minutes of heavyweight toil, in which the most powerful striker in the UFC had turned himself into a wrestler, of all things, to survive.

But for that moment the noise died down.

The noise surrounding his past, the familiars from a different time, his former training partner Gane and former coach Fernand Lopez. The men trying to beat him. The noise of legacy and choices. His future. His UFC contract playing out. Of the media. Of his haters who wanted to see him fail. The noise of boxing, cooing in the distance. Farther off cries. The noise from the sand mines of Cameroon. Of desperation in streets of France, and from within the detention walls of Spain. Sounds nobody wants to hear, of water lapping at the sides of his makeshift boat on the Mediterranean. All the rumbling margins that could close in on him at any given time, and the roaring streaks of light on both sides that he came to know as his life, delivering him to another moment where his fate was a pinwheel.

All of it stopped when a friendly face leaned into his line of vision and temporarily muted the world around him.

“Dude, you’ve been through more sh*t than anybody on this planet,’” his coach Eric Nicksick told him. “You’re literally built for this. This is your life. You’re going to fight these next five minutes, and you’re going to win.”

Of course, he did.

Ngannou went out and won the fifth round and therefore the fight, which changed his life. At least the life that we knew — the life of a fighter. It was easy to frame things in fight game terms: He bet on himself, and he won. The UFC tried to kill him off by sticking him in there against the up-to-that-point undefeated Gane, but couldn’t. Nor could it damage his brand as a free agent. The noise kicked back up. The lights streaked by at his sides. Now he was a superstar. He segued into the world of boxing, and — impossibly — made a massive payday fighting Tyson Fury in Saudi Arabia. Getting the fight alone was a coup, even if boxing people said going in that it was a mockery to the sport. A debuting boxer, no matter how hard he hits or what kind of imposing figure he cuts, had no right to be in there against the heavyweight champion of the world.

There were sacred barriers to entry in title fights, even in the sordid world of prizefighting.

Ngannou went forward against the odds. Boxing was always his first love.

Not only did he stand toe-to-toe with Fury in Riyadh, he knocked him down in the third round. It was one of the most surreal moments in boxing’s recent history. Certainly of 2023. The sight of Fury on the ground, propped on an elbow, and Ngannou — MMA’s representative force, the man who’d already won simply by being there — standing over him. Nicksick and Ngannou’s longtime coach striking coach Dewey Cooper didn’t even celebrate. They just looked around and surveyed the panic in the room, the promoters and moguls who were banking on a Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk fight, adjusting their collars as the golden boy of today’s heavyweight era gathered his wits.

“I just smiled,” Nicksick says.

They knew. They knew Fury might not have taken the fight seriously, because how could he? At a certain level, complacency can’t behave. Yet Ngannou took it seriously, and that was all the insight they needed to do away with surprise. They knew that his power would translate with 10-ounce gloves as well as it would with four-ounce gloves, at least if he connected. And he did. He connected with the fight world at large. He didn’t end up winning the bout, but he went the distance, and it was close. It was like being in a courtroom during sentencing when they read the scorecards, with the 20-to-1 favorite Fury being exonerated from the shame of losing to a debutante.

Boxing survived its scare, while the legend of Ngannou only grew.

That set up another blockbuster fight with England’s Anthony Joshua less than five months later, which this time didn’t strike even the purists of boxing’s faithful as silly. Ngannou had proven that he belonged exactly where he was.

This was the life we saw. The man who won even when he lost. Yet he was still the refugee who couldn’t forget where he came from. Still the philosopher at heart, who at times wondered how he got here. The man who fought to get fighters more pay, including his PFL opponents, whom he negotiated on behalf of to receive $2 million just to face him. It’s the things we don’t see that make him who he is. He’s still the guy who built the Francis Ngannou Foundation in Cameroon, so kids in his home country could pursue their dreams, and took care of his coaches and team at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas with his bounty. He purchased new mats and equipment for the gym and handing out checks such that his coaches had never seen, allowing guys like Nicksick to buy cars for his wife and daughter and pay off all his debts.

“If you understand Francis’s mentality, he’s richer beyond his wildest expectations,” Nicksick says. “When he paid me for the Tyson Fury fight, I did not expect that. I was like, ‘You just changed my entire life, the biggest payday of my life,’ and he just said, ‘Quit being a crybaby.’ I was like, ‘I’m emotional because I’ve worked very long, and very hard for these fighters, and finally I’ve seen the mountaintop.’”

Has Francis seen it? The UFC’s heavyweight champion, who avenged his loss to Stipe Miocic to win the title? The guy who knocked Alistair Overeem’s jaw into the mezzanine with an uppercut, still viewed as one of the greatest knockouts of all time? Who broke the record on the PowerKube at the Performance Institute with one mighty blow? The crossover phenom who shocked the world in the ring against Fury? The man who will try to win a belt for a second organization as he returns to MMA on Saturday, this time against Renan Ferreira in the PFL?

If he’s seen it, he only wishes he’d have been able to enjoy the view.

“Sometimes I think about the past, sometimes I think about the things that I’ve been through, the places that I’ve been through, the situations that I’ve been through, and it’s even hard to believe for me,” Ngannou says. “Even though I was the one living that experience, it’s not a story that I’ve been told.”

You can sometimes see Ngannou think. He is, as Cooper calls him, a “fair thinker.” He weighs his words, whether speaking in French or English.

“Sometimes I really can’t believe it,” Ngannou says, “because there are so many things going on, it feels like my life is just an action movie from start to bottom. Never a break, never time to process anything, so you can sometimes step into a thing, maybe scratch the surface yet never have time to go really deep, and then when you think about it afterwards it’s like I never been there.”

This can be a good and bad thing.

Ngannou got knocked out in his bout against Joshua in March. It happens.

A month later, he lost his 15-month-old son, Kobe.

In this life, that’s the one streak of light he won’t let go.

Right there’s the subtext for Ngannou’s return to MMA, which takes place in Riyadh in what’s being dubbed PFL Super Fights: Battle of the Giants. The fleeting highs and unfathomable lows in the life of Francis Ngannou, rolling in right on top of each other, as if fortune can’t exist without the universe taking its piece. The man who’s been through it all now carries the weight of a loss that we can’t see. And how he’s dealt with everything over the last six months is hard for even his coaches to process.

“I don’t think we’ll ever understand what he’s gone through, because we can’t walk in his shoes,” Nicksick says. “But you get the resolve and the power that he has in here.”

Nicksick is pointing to his chest. In his office at Xtreme Couture he has a poster of Ngannou standing over Fury. That moment lives on as a testament to everything the fighter has dealt with and overcome. Yet this is something different. If you talk to people closest to Ngannou, they choke up at the mention of Kobe, who had a brain condition where the fontanelle — or “soft spot” on infants — never closed up properly within his skull, causing epileptic behaviors.

During fight week for the Joshua fight in Saudi Arabia, Kobe passed out during one such episode and needed to be taken to the hospital. It all happened so fast that Ngannou was left feeling helpless that he couldn’t have done more. Kobe passed away on April 30 in Cameroon, while Ngannou was flying to Abu Dhabi. Sometimes there are no answers.

“I was the first person he called when he found out,’” Nicksick says. “He would always call me and ask me theoretical or hypothetical questions, things like, ‘Bubba, why did you get married?’ or, ‘Why do we celebrate birthdays?’ Some philosophical thing like that. But this time he said, ‘Bubba, what’s the purpose of life?’ After I said some things, then he said, ‘Do you think I’m a good person?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course you’re a good person, why do you ask?’ And he said, ‘Why did they take my son from me?’ I didn’t know what he meant. I knew he always tried to keep his kids out of the public eye and media because of things like kidnappings, things like that, so I didn’t initially think anything. But then he was like, ‘Kobe’s gone.’

“I had to pull over. He’s crying, I’m crying, I don’t know what to say to him. It was the heaviest I’ve ever felt in my life. He’s my best friend, and you think of your own kids. You just want to hug your kids.”

Cooper has spent two months in Paris helping prepare Ngannou for his fight with Ferreira, while Nicksick — with his family in Las Vegas and a gym to run at Xtreme Couture — was only able to get 10 days with Ngannou out there. Both have been there through one of the hardest camps of Ngannou’s life, in which they’ve tried to be there for him in whatever way he needs it.

“He’s a positive thinker and I think that’s very important,” Cooper says. “He used one word — purpose. He said that the loss of his son, Kobe, that tragedy, is giving him a purpose.”

Cooper has been in Ngannou’s corner longer than any of the other coaches, and even he isn’t sure how everything that has happened in 2024 will play out come fight night.

“All I know is that [Francis] is a rare individual,” he says. “You know his story, all the things he’s been through and all of that, man, the going to jail and being thrown in the desert and trapped at sea and failing to get across the border seven different times, it’s crazy. How he persevered and became what he has become really is crazy.

“But we don’t really know, man. We’ll see. If training camp’s an indication, he’s going to be fine. He’s going to do what he always does. Training camp has been fine. I do worry about those crevice areas of the psyche, and all we can do is take what he says and how he feels. He’s feeling good. He’s saying positive motivational things and saying that he’s going to use this shadow, this negative occurrence, to help reinvigorate him into something better and more positive and more dominant. And we’re also hoping that’s the case.”

The fight world sees a specimen of a heavyweight, a muscle-bound man who has extraordinary power in his hands. When he fought Miocic for the belt the first time in Boston at UFC 220, he tried to knock the champion’s head off his shoulders. We could hear the whizz and whir of the punches that just missed Miocic’s head at the media table cageside. With each blow he threw, there was a gasp, because that kind of power comes with involuntary reactions. It’s the anticipation. The exhilaration. And when he began to falter, it was a different kind of blow. By the second round, he was already dragging. By the third, you could see the helplessness. The man they call “The Predator” was being taken down to the canvas, again and again. Everything was happening against his will. The fight moved on with him on his back, whether he liked it or not.

He could do nothing about it.

When he lost the following fight against Derrick Lewis, it was one of the most anticlimactic events in UFC heavyweight history. He simply couldn’t throw punches. He said he felt “hypnotized,” and that he was “stuck in the mud.” Worrying about repeating what happened with Miocic paralyzed him, shut down his kill switch. He said there was an abstract sense that he had more time. More time. More time. But the lights were streaking by, and then the horn sounded and it was over.

It wasn’t, of course. Not when you pan back to see the whole picture, as we tend to do toward the twilight of a great fighter’s career. It was the continuation to an already incredible story, so incredible in fact it feels impossible that it could have happened. He went forward. It’s the only way to go. Now he arrives back where he started. In the MMA cage.

How will Ngannou do against Ferreira in his return?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’m going to find out. I’m trying. It’s been by far my toughest year. I always feel like I have the answer of everything, except this time. But I will find out.”

We all will. And as Ngannou finally slows down to reflect on his life and career when it’s all said and done, one thing’s for sure — he’ll know the deeper meaning behind wins and losses. Some wins would be nothing without the losses, and some losses become part of your strength forever.