UFC’s Francis Ngannou: “Becoming a heavyweight champion was …. my own revenge on my life.”

When MMA fighter, Francis Ngannou, stepped into the octagon to take on then-UFC heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic, he wasn’t just trying to win the title. Ngannou was on a mission to prove himself to the world.

“Life threw me a lot of punches,” Ngannou told In the Moment’s David Greene. “Life put me down and made people doubt me.”

Ngannou spent years of his life trying to put that doubt behind him. He grew up in the mountains of western Cameroon and started working in the sand mines when he was just 9-years-old. He said he would be thrown out of school for not having basic necessities like paper or pen. From a young age, he was determined to leave Cameroon to overcome the poverty he was born into.

It took another decade for him to realize his lifelong ambition. On March 27, 2021, in his second bout with Miocic, Ngannou knocked him out just 52 seconds into the second round. He says the victory was “my own revenge on my life, on my childhood.”

Ngannou doesn’t want to encourage Cameroonian youth to make the same dangerous journey he did, but he wants to help them succeed. He’s opened a youth gym in Cameroon and is planning two others.

“The main goal of it was just to empower those kids,” he said. “To make them believe in themselves, because growing up out there, having a dream was very hard.”

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We initially ran this story on 10/4/2022