Lineal heavyweight champion, former UFC heavyweight champion, and recent professional boxer Francis Ngannou will return to the sport where he made his name this weekend at PFL’s Battle of the Giants card in Saudi Arabia.
The MMA “giants” in question are, of course, Ngannou and opponent Renan Ferreira, the 2023 PFL heavyweight champ.
With the fight arriving on October 19, “The Predator” is in full swing on his promotional tour, after a rough year that saw him knocked out by Anthony Joshua in boxing, then suffer the sudden death of his infant son.
Appearing on The Ariel Helwani Show on Monday, Ngannou (17-3) revealed that returning to training “wasn’t hard.”
When he first stepped back into the gym, Ngannou took the approach of “let’s go to the gym and see,” explaining that his thinking was “I’m not really sure of anything, I don’t really know if I’m going to do this, or if I can give my all. And if I cannot give it all, maybe it’s better to just cut it out, just take your time, or just cut it out. Because fighting, again, it’s not like a game. When you’re fighting, you’d better be there, focused in there.”
What Ngannou came to realize was that when he was in the gym, he wasn’t caught up in his grief. No matter how his day was going.
“When I’m in the gym, I’m just focused on training. I don’t think about it [the sadness]. Maybe after, when I’m finished training. That’s when I realized I could do it, because it’s not interfering with my training. It’s not like in between rounds, I’m thinking of it. Between rounds, I’m just thinking of what I’m doing right in the fight, in training.”
That’s when Francis Ngannou realized it would be okay, after as he put it, just going with the flow.
Ngannou was also asked about Renan Ferreira’s relative lack of “name value,” given the PFL champ hasn’t become a household name like fellow (now former) PFL star Kayla Harrison.
“We don’t fight names, we fight talent,” stated Ngannou. “The name in that octagon doesn’t matter. It’s useless useless. We fight talent. And let me tell you something, this guy has talent. Of all my opponents, I think he’s definitely going to be one of my toughest fights.”
After all, Ferriera, he pointed out, is well-rounded, and has high-level grappling. Perhaps more surprisingly, Ngannou went on to add “I take this fight as the underdog. I feel like I’m the underdog, yeah.”
Francis Ngannou faces Renan Ferreira at the PFL Battle of the Giants: Brace for Impact card in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at the Kingdom Arena on October 19, 2024.
