Francis Ngannou was supposed to lose his boxing debut against Tyson Fury, because the heavyweight champion Fury had 34 times the ring experience and voodoo in his jelly rolls. Luckily for boxing, Ngannou did lose. Even if it didn’t look that way. Fury was knocked down by MMA’s Ngannou in the third round, and looked disoriented by the eighth. When it was all said and done after 10 rounds at the Money Flex Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Saturday, most people thought Ngannou had won the “Battle of the Baddest.”
It’s that last sentence that makes no sense at all.
Most people thought the 7.5-to-1 underdog Francis Ngannou beat the most decorated heavyweight boxer currently going, in a fight that went the distance.
Go back and watch the bout. Ngannou did beat Fury. It’s all on tape. The same Tyson Fury who knocked out Deontay Wilder twice, and patted the heads of Dillian Whyte and Derek Chisora when they dared test themselves against his virtuosity. The same Fury who, before fighting Ngannou, had already agreed to his next title defense against Oleksandr Usyk—the actual boxer that the boxing public yearned for as a dream challenger.
But that very same Fury got shown up by a boxing greenhorn for a pile of Saudi cash, even if the judges ultimately gave Fury a split decision. So what the hell happened? A former UFC heavyweight champion with one of the most unlikely refugee stories of our time, who worked in the sand mines as a child in his native Cameroon and nearly died taking an inflatable raft across the Strait of Gibraltar to chase his dream, didn’t end up having his Cinderella story smashed by boxing’s coldest dealer of reality?
That itself is an incredible upset.
In fact, it’s one of the greatest upsets of all time, in that it upset just about fucking everyone. It upset the UFC’s Dana White, who let Ngannou walk from the organization after the two battled over a new contract. It upset boxing purists who pinched their noses at Ngannou—the latest interloper to violate the boxing tradition—getting a fight of this magnitude in his debut. It upset bettors who had Fury in props and parlays. And it upset the many Ngannou haters who said he “fumbled the bag” when he left the UFC, only to get paid eight digits for 30 minutes of ring work while not getting humiliated.
One little side stunt bout changed the course of so much, at least for the immediate future. The Fury-Usyk fight that’s supposed to happen in December? That fight just lost much of its bluster. Ngannou’s return to MMA? Whoever the PFL books him against will feel like a buzzkill, unless it’s Deontay Wilder showing up in four-ounce gloves. And ultimately, it upset everyone who was ready for crossover fights to become a thing of the past. Because what was looking more and more like the final act to these detouring, money-grabbing clashes likely just opened the floodgates instead.
That’s because Ngannou did what Conor McGregor couldn’t against Floyd Mayweather six years ago in what was the gateway event that started us down this crossover path: He made the price of the pay-per-view worth it. He gave unexpected merit to a tired trope. He wasn’t just spinning our wheels. No hoodwinking, like what we saw with Dillon Danis and Logan Paul a couple of weeks back. No hollow feelings like we had after watching Jake Paul and Nate Diaz. No walk-of-shame moment like we had after that ill-fated Triller event when Jake knocked out Ben Askren.
None of that.
What we got on Saturday was Ngannou satisfying the long aching need that these novelty setups had yet to deliver. After all the lead-up pageantry, Ngannou showed us that he wasn’t delusional. He went in there and threw the world of combat sports into a tither by stretching its imagination. He tapped into the root of the pursuit, and he got all that loot. Francis was already an MMA rock star for standing up to the UFC and getting the biggest fight (and payday) possible, yet now—at 37 years old—he’s emerged as a superstar.
Now he’s in line for an even bigger boxing match. Will it be against Wilder? Anthony Joshua? Chisora or Whyte or Zhilei Zhang? Will they run it back with Fury-Ngannou II, this time for Fury’s heavyweight title? All of these options are infinitely better than Ngannou versus Phil De Fries in the cage. And why wouldn’t those boxers welcome the idea of that fight? If they can look good against a raw fighter who made Fury look so bad—and get millions of dollars in the process—why not? Every top-10 heavyweight will be mashing their fists at the chance. Francis is now big business in both sports, boxing and MMA, and what’s even better is that he’s now believable as the baddest man alive in either.
That’s quite a leap after one boxing match.
If you’ve grown tired of MMA fighters calling out boxers and boxers calling out MMA fighters, you might want to cover your ears. Because the inter-sport callouts are about to get louder than ever before.
Just recently, new UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland flirted with the idea of jumping to boxing at some point, which before Saturday was met with a collective groan. Bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley has been chirping with boxers Gervonta “Tank” Davis and Devin Haney, the youth of both sports looking into each other’s backyards. Nobody paid it much mind. Even the great Fedor Emelianenko was calling for a fight against 57-year-old Mike Tyson, who just happened to be in Ngannou’s corner in Riyadh. OK, that one drew a laugh.
Then Saturday happened. MMA’s Ngannou showed up with former UFC champions Kamaru Usman and Israel Adesanya at his side—the Three Kings—and also had McGregor, Chuck Liddell, Rampage Jackson and other MMA greats cheering him in Saudi Arabia. In the other corner, Fury walked through a who’s who of boxing royalty, from Evander Holyfield to Sugar Ray Leonard to Larry Holmes, as he made his way to the ring. The lines were drawn to maximum effect—MMA versus boxing.
If Ngannou had gotten blasted by Fury as he was supposed to, it would have very likely put an end to the crossover craze. But if combat sports had a fulcrum event, it was the fight that kicked off the “Riyadh season.” And there was a lesson to it. Right before the fight, Fury yelled over to Francis: “Let me take you to school!” So when Francis knocked Fury down in the third round with a left hand, a shot that was heard around the world, Ngannou loomed over Fury with his response.
“You’re a bad professor, motherfucker,” he said.