Francis Ngannou: Beating Renan Ferreira was ‘a way for me to find out if I can still fight, if I still have it’

Francis Ngannou has won a lot of fights. The toughest battle he’ll face for the rest of his life is one that he can only survive, but can’t actually win.

Making his PFL debut just six months after Ngannou’s 15-month-old son Kobe died tragically, the former UFC heavyweight champion was unsure about his future Saturday night. Despite all the accomplishments he racked up over the years, Ngannou just wasn’t the same person after losing his son, and he couldn’t help but question if perhaps his fighting career was over.

“It was my biggest challenge in the way that I wasn’t the person that I used to be,” Ngannou said after his win over Renan Ferreira on Saturday. “Coming into this fight, this fight was also a way for me to find out if I can still fight. If I still have it. Something like that.

“If I can deal with this, the pressure, with the fight week, with the media and everything. We got through [it].”

All of Ngannou’s questions were answered once he got in the cage and delivered a vintage performance after he took Ferreira down early in the opening round and then delivered a vicious ground-and-pound finish. It took him less than four minutes to dispatch the PFL’s top heavyweight and get his first win since beating Ciryl Gane back in 2022.

Ngannou was understandably overwhelmed with emotion after the fight was over as he fought back the tears while dedicating the victory to his son.

While it was a physically dominant performance, Ngannou felt the toughest obstacles he had to overcome before Saturday came down to the mental warfare happening inside his own head.

“It was pretty hard,” Ngannou said. “It was hard at any moment from the beginning to the end, but I think it’s one of those things, you ask yourself is it ever going to be over? You think it might never be over. You just might as well learn how to roll with it, to live with it. Because in certain cases, I would have taken time to grieve but how long would that take?

“I don’t think there’s enough time for me to do that. I don’t think a lifetime would be enough to grieve. Is it just about keep going? It’s a new way of living that I have to learn.”

Enduring and surviving the past six months forced Ngannou to show the kind of strength he didn’t think was possible. Ngannou says nothing could possibly prepare him for what he’s gone through, but he eventually found a way to step out of the darkness into the light.

“They’ve been telling me that I’m tough to the point that I get to believe that I am tough,” Ngannou said. “Then I recently just found out that I wasn’t tough. I wasn’t that tough.

“I’ve seen people going through it, and out of compassion, I’ve been trying to understand how it must feel, but you never get anywhere close to how it feels exactly.”