Francis Ngannou motivated to return to MMA competition in memory of son: ‘For Kobe’

Francis Ngannou enters his MMA comeback fight this October with the heaviest of hearts.

This past April, Ngannou revealed that his 15-month son Kobe died following a medical emergency. The devastating news hit the Ngannou family just a month after his most recent fight, a second-round knockout loss to Anthony Joshua in a boxing match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Ngannou is now set to compete in his first MMA fight in almost three years when he takes on Renan Ferreira at a PFL pay-per-view event on Oct. 19. In an interview with Sky Sports Boxing, Ngannou discussed how a return to training is helping him to work through the tragedy and how his son continues to motivate him.

“I need some activities,” Ngannou said. “I need to stay active, to be in a zone that I belong to. Maybe that also will help or change, I also need to keep it going to fight for my boy. For Kobe.”

“The past three months haven’t been the easiest,” Ngannou continued. “I think it has been by far the hardest shape in life since I lost my son. For some time, I felt like I didn’t even have to do this or questioning about if I should do it or fight again or something, but I know that my son had something good in his memory and I wanted to do something good in his memory. To use this not to be the reason for me to quit, but maybe to be a motivation and also to fight for him.”

Ngannou’s most recent cagefight took place at UFC 270, where he defeated Ciryl Gane by unanimous decision to retain the UFC heavyweight title. What followed was a protracted contract dispute with the promotion, which saw Ngannou eventually secure his release after a year of inactivity, leaving him free to sign with PFL and later land high-profile boxing bouts with Tyson Fury and Joshua.

With Ngannou making major waves in the boxing world, there was some doubt as to whether he would compete in MMA again. And when news of his son’s death broke, it raised the question of whether Ngannou still wanted to fight at all.

“It’s not that I have come close to retiring, it’s just that … you have different thoughts,” Ngannou said. “You see how fragile life is. You feel you’re hurt, you feel powerless, you feel useless. You question your existence, about the importance of all of this, or life in general, but it’s not that I have considered retiring or something. It’s just that you have to deal with something that wasn’t on the landscape before.”

An important part of the Ngannou mythology is his rise from an impoverished upbringing in Cameroon to combat sports star, a journey that culminated in Ngannou becoming UFC heavyweight champion in 2021.

But nothing Ngannou has gone through could prepare him for the loss of Kobe.

“I think it’s easy to overcome hurdles, to overcome life’s challenges when it’s just situations,” Ngannou said. “But this is something different. It’s something that hurts your soul. It’s different. I would not compare this to anything that I knew or that I experienced. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but it’s different.

“All of a sudden you feel like you haven’t been able to do anything in your life, you haven’t been able to overcome anything, you feel the most vulnerable as you have ever been.”

Ready or not, Ngannou has plenty to prove when he fights Ferreira on Oct. 19. Ferreira is coming off of a stunning 2023 campaign that saw him win a PFL heavyweight tournament and become the front-runner in the Ngannou sweepstakes.

Is the Brazilian slugger poised to spoil Ngannou’s comeback fight?

“I just have to find that out by fighting,” Ngannou said. “There’s only one way to find out, but also I think now I have a different motivation in my son. I used to fight for a lot of reasons, but I don’t think I had the biggest reason, the biggest purpose to fight until now.”