Ngannou admits he wasn’t sure if he ‘still had it’ coming into his first MMA fight in over two years against Rennan Ferreira at PFL’s ‘Battle of the Giants.’
It took Francis Ngannou just three and a half minutes to dispatch Rennan Ferreira in the main event of PFL’s “Battle of the Giants” pay-per-view.
The former UFC heavyweight champ took down the PFL champ one minute into the first round, surviving a triangle attempt before battering Ferreira with relentless ground and pound for a KO win. Watch the finish here. After the victory, he remained on the canvas for several moments, overwhelmed by the moment and emotions he was feeling.
There was a lot of sorrow mixed in with Ngannou’s post-fight celebration. “The Predator” had lost his 15-month-old son Kobe in April due to a “fatal malformation on his brain.” To compete at that level just six months later, in one of the most important matches of his career, was impressive. Not even Ngannou was sure he could do it.
“I used to be — I mean, they’ve been telling me that I’m tough to the point that I get to believe that I’m tough,” he said at the PFL post-fight press conference. “And then I recently just find out that I wasn’t tough. I wasn’t that tough, you know?”
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“Life can let you take an advance and think you’re running away, and then it hits you really bad, like from the front,” Ngannou added. “And then, it’s something that I never imagined. I seen people going through it and I’d tried to understand how it feels, out of compassion, but never got close to how it felt exactly.”
“It was pretty hard. It was hard at any moment, from the beginning to the end, but I think it’s one of those things that you kind of ask yourself, ‘Is this gonna ever be over?’ And you think it might never be over. You might as well learn how to roll with it, to live with it. In certain cases, I would have taken time, you know, to grieve. But how long would that take?”
“I don’t think there’s enough time for me to do that,” he concluded. “I don’t think a lifetime would be enough, to grieve. So it was just about, like, keep going, you know? It’s a new life, a new way of living that I have to learn.”
Ngannou’s description of the moment he won was heartbreaking.
“Okay, it’s over, and it’s done,” he recalled. “I did what I came here to do. And, yeah, I have to go back into my reality, you know, to face it.”
The Cameroonian fighter admitted to having serious doubts about his ability to fight at the highest level against Ferreira.
“He was my biggest challenge in that I wasn’t the person that I used to be, coming into this fight,” he said. “This fight for me was also a way to find out if I still have it, something like that. If I can deal deal with the pressure, with the 5 week [training camp], with media, and everything. And, yeah, we got through.”
Ngannou’s last words before departing the press conference were inspirational but grounded.
“Yes, he was hard. He was very hard,” Ngannou said. “But, you know, life is always hard. Nothing in life comes easy. Everything is gonna be hard, and you’re gonna give what it takes to get what you want, if you really want it.”