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Francis Ngannou took part in one of the most lucrative boxing matches of the year on Saturday night when he came up against Tyson Fury in Saudi Arabia. But the Cameroon former UFC world champion has been at the other end of the scale, growing up in poverty and working a £1.50-a-day job before ending up in jail.
Ngannou is expected to leave the Middle East with an estimated £8million fight purse after going head-to-head in the ring with WBC Heavyweight champion Fury in what will be the African’s first-ever professional boxing contest.
Unsurprisingly, Fury is the overwhelming favourite but his opponent knows plenty about succeeding against the odds because he has done it his entire life.
The 37-year-old was born in the village of Batie, where he was raised by his parents until they divorced when he was six years old. Ngannou’s father was a street fighter who would take on groups of gang members in the village and still come out on top.
After his parents split he was sent to stay with his Aunt instead. Living in poverty and with next to no formal education, he started working from the age of 10 in a sand quarry in order to bring more money into the household.
Working for £1.50 a day, his job (alongside his brother) was to shovel sand into piles so the mend could then load it onto tipping trucks.
In 1994 he became engrossed with the football World Cup in the USA, but more so for the spectacle of the country than the actual action on the pitch. His love for all things Stateside saw him give himself the nickname ‘American Boy’ and instead of signing his name as Francis, he used to write Francisco, after the Californian city of San Francisco.
He also used to love the cult US TV show Knight Rider, which starred David Hasselhoff. Ngannou dreamed of getting to America, but his friends all wanted to head to France for a better life in Europe. Ngannou also went this way, but it took him 14 months to get there.
After reaching Niger, he now needed a visa which could be circumnavigated by bribing corrupt border control officers. Ngannou hid some of his life savings before cramming into the back of a truck with 24 others to cross the Sahara desert to Algeria.
The 24 hour journey was a battle of survival with the truck breaking down and a shortage of water. Ngannou admitted that he had been forced to drink water “with dead animals in it”.
Once in Algeria, his next task was to acquire a Malian passport, which he did illegally. This got him into Morocco but his luck was about to run out. Keeping a low profile, here he would live in the woods and eat food out of bins.
The illegal border crossing between Morocco and Spain was Ngannou’s route into Europe but also the most dangerous part of his journey. He was forced to go to hospital after cutting his stomach on barbed wire when trying to get over the security fence.
After police dumped him back in the desert, he had no intention of giving up. After studying the 11-mile fence he was able to breach it and made the short trip from Morroco to Spain in a boat that was covered in tin foil to avoid infrared motion sensors. Once near the other side, he called the Red Cross who saved him.
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There was no hero’s welcome, however, as he was then thrown in a Spanish prison. Bizarrely, because of his false passport the Spanish authorities were unable to deport him or keep him behind bars and he was subsequently released after two months.
From here he bunked a train to France and reached Paris where he slept rough before looking for a gym to train at. By chance, he met Fernand Lopez – a coach at the MMA Factory in Paris – and the rest is history.
Ngannou had set out to become a boxer but was now on course for a career in MMA which he reached the pinnacle of when he won his first UFC world championship on March 27, 2021, before winning it again on January 22, 2022.
Fast forward to today and he has just faced Fury in a fight that he craved as a boy.
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