Can Francis Ngannou still be the baddest man on the planet?

BATIÉ, Cameroon — IT’S A COLD, foggy morning in August, which is the middle of the rainy season in Central Africa. Francis Ngannou and I are standing in the backyard of the three-story home he built for himself in 2020.

This compound — with its iron gate, guardhouse, swimming pool and China-imported marble floors — looks out of place. There’s not another one like it for miles. It’s near Ngannou’s childhood home, which is constructed of mud bricks and scraps of zinc. When he was young, Ngannou used to lean stalks of bamboo against its open windows during these wet months, to preserve warmth.

“This still used to be my favorite time of the year,” he tells ESPN, despite the chill in the air. “It’s harvest season, which means we were less likely to go hungry.”

I have known Ngannou since 2015 and listened to the story of his life dozens of times. The boy from a small village, who dreamt of becoming a professional boxer. Who, at 26, set off on a harrowing 14-month emigration to Europe, during which he nearly lost his life. He eventually made it to Paris, where he was introduced to MMA. Within eight years, he’d conquered that sport by winning a UFC title. In the past two years, he’s become a multimillionaire from boxing matches against Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua.

As familiar as I am with Ngannou’s story, though, physically standing on the ground where it all began — visiting the mud-brick home he grew up in, where he once owned a single toothbrush for 12 years — makes the story feel impossible.

More than half of Cameroon lives in poverty. The very land Ngannou’s home is built, he doesn’t know how it came into his possession. He believes his grandfather claimed it after Cameroon gained its independence from French rule in 1960, following a bloody conflict frequently glossed over in discussions of European and African history. In a way, this country has been denied the simple right to define its past.

And yet, arguably the No. 1 heavyweight fighter on the planet somehow emerged from one of its quietest corners.

“The people of this region are still just building and starting over,” Ngannou says. “The good thing is that we are very hard workers.”

On Saturday, the 38-year-old Ngannou will return to MMA for the first time since 2022. He’ll face last year’s PFL heavyweight champion, Renan Ferreira, in the main event of PFL Super Fights: Battle of the Giants in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It’s a dangerous fight, as Ferreira is one of the most explosive athletes the division has seen since, well, Ngannou himself. The 34-year-old Brazilian stands 6-foot-8 and is known for a signature backflip celebration after each of his wins. He’s knocked out his past four opponents, three in the first round.

Of course, the challenge of a fight against Ferreira is nothing compared to what Ngannou has already overcome. This is the man who survived seven attempts into the Strait of Gibraltar on an inflatable raft, during his effort to get to Europe. This mansion that he built on the very same land in which he grew up with nothing, stands like a symbol of defiance against the fate he was supposed to be born into. He took on what his life was supposed to look like long ago, and he won.

But as he stands here on this August morning, two months out from his MMA return, he admits he doesn’t know how he will handle this latest challenge ahead of him. He isn’t sure how the fight will go because he isn’t even sure of who he is anymore.

And the reason Ngannou feels that way is also here on this property. It too, has no business being here or anywhere else. It’s the grave of his 15-month-old son, Kobe, who died unexpectedly in April.

“I know that I’m not the same that I was before,” Ngannou says. “To be honest, this fight is a way for me to truly find out. Like, deep inside, am I still that same fighter that I used to be?”

---

A MAP OF the village of Batié officially refers to Ngannou’s house as Résidence Emmanuel Fosso, named after his late father.

Ngannou was 15 when his father died, and although the two did not have a consistent presence in each other’s lives at that point, it had a profound impact on him. His father was sick for months before he passed and was too poor to afford medical care. He died in his home on his family’s land; his final days were spent untreated in agony.

“His skin was melting, and he couldn’t even go to the hospital,” Ngannou says. “At that time, I had an excuse that I was a kid and couldn’t do anything about it. But then you grow old, and you look at your mom and you’re like, ‘What if the same thing happened again? What If I have kids and that happens to one of them?’ And you just realize that you have to take action.”

Eleven years after his father’s death, Ngannou took action. He embraced his family for perhaps the last time, and he left. He told only his sister of his intent to head for Europe, knowing his mother would try to prevent it.

“Every time our mother would wonder where Francis was, our sister would say that he was still in the city and had lost his phone,” Michel Fomo, Francis’ younger brother, tells ESPN. “Eventually after many months, Francis needed someone to send money and that’s when our sister told her. I remember there were weeks that we wouldn’t hear from him and everyone in the house would panic. We would read about immigrants dying at sea and wonder if it was him.”

In March 2013, Ngannou successfully crossed into Europe after the Red Cross rescued him from a raft in the Strait of Gibraltar. Within 10 weeks, he settled in Paris and wasted no time getting to work on his dream of becoming a boxer. Fate would step in though, and he would be introduced to MMA and join a gym, where he learned opportunities to make money would come much faster. He took his first professional MMA fight later that year, just nine months after crossing continents.

Remarkably, it only took Ngannou two years to draw attention from the UFC. He signed with the promotion in 2015 and made his debut that December in Orlando, Florida. It was his first time in America, a special moment in his career that will always stand out. The U.S. had been as big a part of his childhood dream as boxing. He’d wanted to go there since the day he first saw heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson on the screen of a small television at a store in Batié.

“I would always dream about America, that was my dream,” Ngannou says. “And when I got to Orlando, there was a greeter at the airport with a tablet that said my name. And I just remember thinking about how I had entered Paris as an immigrant two years before through a service entrance. And now, in America, I was entering on the red carpet. That was the day that I went to my room and made an important call to my mom. I called her and said, ‘I’m in America. Your son has made it.'”

On Dec. 19, 2015, Ngannou knocked out Luis Henrique Barbosa in the second round of his first bout in the UFC for a disclosed fight purse of $20,000, the most money he’d ever earned. He would go on to much bigger fights in the UFC and much bigger paydays. He won the UFC heavyweight championship in 2021 and left the promotion in 2023 to sign an MMA deal with the PFL that allowed him to pursue the two lucrative boxing matches against Fury and Joshua.

There’s a story from Ngannou’s youth, in which he was kicked out of school one day at 13 years old for not having a pencil — which he was too poor to afford. Instead of walking home, Ngannou sat down by the school’s back gate, because he was so ashamed that any car passing along the N5 highway, one of the only two-lane roads that connect the cities of southwest Cameroon, would know he’d been kicked out. Any other child in the area would be sitting in that classroom.

“That was the day when I said, ‘Enough is enough,'” Ngannou remembers. “I was so mad that I was tearing up. I was thinking about everything, the disgrace I felt, the way the other kids looked down on me. And I was really like, ‘I want to get my revenge on life, you know?’ Not revenge on somebody, but just on life for coming at me so hard. I remember that exact day, where I was, everything.”

Considering everything Ngannou has accomplished, it’s safe to say he achieved his revenge on life a long time ago. But as it turned out, life wasn’t done with him yet.

“There was a point where I thought I had won everything in life,” Ngannou says. “I would look at my family and my son, my own heritage, and tell myself, ‘I have won.’ It never crossed my mind that something would happen to him.”

---

NGANNOU WAS TRAINING in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on April 27 when Michel called to say he and Ngannou’s mother were at the hospital in Cameroon. They had been watching Kobe in his home, when the toddler suddenly collapsed.

Kobe, who Ngannou named after the late NBA star Kobe Bryant, had fainted twice previously. The second time had happened one month prior when the family was in Saudi Arabia for Ngannou’s boxing match against Joshua. Physicians in Saudi Arabia assured Ngannou the fainting spells had been caused by a very manageable respiratory issue. Ngannou and his family were satisfied with that diagnosis, they had no reason not to be.

Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Kobe was pronounced dead. An autopsy eventually revealed he’d developed a fatal malformation on his brain. “He was barely walking, but I was already looking for his soccer outfit,” Ngannou says. “I had just built a rooftop for a basketball court for him. I felt like I got hit by exactly what I’d been avoiding my entire life. My whole life, I had worried that if someone got sick like my dad, I didn’t want to feel powerless again. I wanted to be in a position to fight and do something about it. And then the time came and the one person that I needed to fight for, I couldn’t. And in that moment you realize you have nothing figured out.”

On May 4, Ngannou buried Kobe on his family’s property. The loss of his son made him question not only every detail of his future, but also his past. What good was his story, all of the unbelievable things he had done, if it didn’t make a difference in a situation like this? He considered retiring from fighting.

“I was thinking maybe I should call it now,” Ngannou says. “But then I’m like, what would honor him? What would honor my son the most? Would it be better for him to be the reason I stop doing what I do, or would it be better for him to become the purpose of it?”

In June, Ngannou traveled back to the U.S. and took his two coaches, Eric Nicksick and Dewey Cooper, to dinner in Las Vegas. It was the first time the three of them had all been together since the night of the Joshua fight on March 8. Nicksick, the coach at Xtreme Couture MMA gym, didn’t know what to expect at that dinner. Part of him prepared to accept that the ride with Ngannou was over.

“We weren’t sure what his mindset was after the death of Kobe,” Nicksick says. “We were just trying to be there as his friends. But that’s when he said, ‘I want to fight again.’ That was the first time he told us, at that dinner.

“I had mixed emotions at first, just because I didn’t know where his head was at. But then he told us his motivations, that we were going to take a fight and that we were going to do it for Kobe. That was pretty heavy to hear. And it just became clear that this fight was going to be about a different purpose. You know, we’ve fought together for championships, for money and for whatever else. This one is different.”

Despite all of the challenges Ngannou has endured, Saturday’s fight is both familiar and completely new. As a fighter, he will return to an MMA cage after taking on the massive disadvantage of challenging world-class boxers in their comfort zone of a ring. He will do so, however, as a different human being than the one who successfully defended the UFC championship in 2022, in his last MMA fight. When asked if he’s still searching for the “revenge on life” he once sought, Ngannou quickly responds that he is not.

He doesn’t believe the universe is against him or committed to testing him at every turn. He is grateful for what he does have, although he’s also learned to expect nothing. He’s learned he can control only himself. Beyond that, life will do what it wants to do.

And Kobe? His joyful son, who climbed everything in sight and would visibly change the moment he even heard his father enter the room — will he be with Ngannou on Saturday night? Ngannou admits he is not a spiritual person and doesn’t know if his son will be watching this fight that’s being done in his name. But his memory will be alive, and win or lose, that’s enough.

“I hope he is [watching], but I really don’t know the answer to that,” Ngannou says. “I just want to keep him alive, you know? His name. Don’t forget about him so soon. I want to express what he really meant.”