If it hasn’t hit you already, it just so happens to be peak season for novelty fights. In early August, MMA cult hero Nate Diaz will take on Jake Paul, the influencer turned boxer, in a professional boxing match that only the most rogue combat fans can understand, and earlier this month, we learned that erstwhile UFC champion Francis Ngannou will take on boxing’s heavyweight king, Tyson Fury, on October 28 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Yet even with beer goggles and lowered inhibitions, there’s a tinge of guilt attached to these features. We know that what we’re being seduced by at night will look entirely different at the break of day. Viewed purely from an entertainment standpoint, instead of King Kong vs. Godzilla and Alien vs. Predator, we’re getting Predator vs. Gypsy King. Box office stuff. Sort of. Lots of explosions and pectoral action. And because it is a pay-per-view, probably more than a few regrets, as well.
You know what a matchup like this does, though? It gets people talking about what they really want in a fight. It’s been a lot of fun to sit back and take in all the reactions to the making of Fury-Ngannou. Most open-minded combat fans keep asking, “What’s not to love?” Meanwhile, boxing purists and spurned UFC fans keep answering, “just about fucking everything.” It’s a fight that calls heavily on the imagination, and plenty of fight fans willfully close that off when the powers that be start messing with the sanctity of their respective sports.
After all, isn’t a bout of this kind a little absurd? Deceptive? Unnecessary? Of course! But isn’t all that part of the fight game as we know it?
Fury is the best heavyweight boxer on the planet and is still very much in his prime, and Ngannou has exactly zero professional boxing matches to his name. By design, this has the look of a colossal waste of time—especially with Conor McGregor’s nine-digit boxing lark against Floyd Mayweather from 2017 still so fresh in the memory bank. Besides, didn’t that moonlighting money-grab effectively end the vitality of McGregor’s career? He has won exactly one fight since then, which came against a diminished Donald Cerrone in 2020, meaning he traded the fighting spirit people fell in love with for a Lamborghini yacht.
If you’re a fan of Ngannou, you think about this kind of thing. This is a digression you never asked for. People are mad that Ngannou is defecting from the orderly world in which he captivated his audience, pissed off that his destiny as the heavyweight champion who could’ve and should’ve been fighting Jon Jones is now sidelined by an adventure he’s not likely to return from. In fact, when he and Jones had that impromptu stare-down at a PFL event last month, it was the cruelest of teases. The best heavyweight fight of all time that we’ll never get. A giant set of blue balls for fight fans everywhere.
But sometimes subtext is bigger than the story itself, especially in the age of juicy social media sagas. Redemption is at the heart of the Fury-Ngannou crossover fight, so much so that the bout is really nothing more than a bonus to the wars already waged.
From Ngannou’s vantage point, a big-time boxing match with Fury isn’t just a dream come true—remember, his original plan was to box when he landed on Fernand Lopez’s doorstep in Paris as a refugee from Cameroon—it’s a public dunk on UFC president Dana White. White offered his heavyweight champion a contract earlier this year after a frustratingly long standoff, and Ngannou ultimately declined. He made it no secret that he felt undervalued in the UFC, and the UFC wasn’t about to budge from its bottom line. So he bet on himself and became the biggest free agent in MMA history and a 6-foot-4, 260-pound target for hate. In combat sports circles, that has been one of the biggest story lines of the year.
Over the last few months, we’ve heard every take under the sun, some of which have come from Dana’s own mouth. Francis Ngannou is ducking Jon Jones. Francis is fumbling the bag. Francis doesn’t want to fight. Francis is ruining his career. Francis will never get a big-name boxer. On and on.
White even tried to steer attention away from a potential Ngannou-Fury fight by claiming the UFC was open to bringing Fury over to the octagon for a fight with Jones to determine “the baddest man on the planet.” The collective yawn from the fan base was audible and produced big, salty tears.
When Ngannou signed a contract with the PFL in May—which essentially gave him a truckload of money and the freedom to box and compete in the PFL’s Super Fight Division—all it did was kick the chorus back up. Ngannou made the worst decision possible. By trying to appease his own conscience and get himself and his opponents paid, he ruined his legacy. Worse, he overestimated the public’s appetite to see him compete against the biggest names in boxing. He’d never land that big boxing match.
Now, here he is, fighting the biggest boxer in the world, a name many far more deserving fighters can’t get near, for more money than he made in the entirety of his UFC career. He’ll stand to make eight figures from this fight after earning a disclosed purse of $600,000 in his last UFC title defense. There are pay-per-view points in the balance and million-dollar paydays in the PFL when he returns in the first quarter of 2024. From a financial perspective, Ngannou has already won. He bet on himself, and he’s about to get paid.
Fury-Ngannou won’t be an “exhibition,” as promoter Eddie Hearn suggested. It will be an official fight on record, even if no belts are on the line. Knockouts are in play, which everyone knows are Ngannou’s only path to victory. Francis will arrive in Riyadh with nothing more than the proverbial puncher’s chance and, as his spiritual counterpart Nate Diaz would say, a pocket full of cash.
And let’s be honest: Never has the puncher’s chance carried so much hope as it will here. Not that GIMIK Fight Promotions (which is what Ngannou is trollishly calling his promotional arm) can use the B-roll, but we’ve seen Ngannou’s power. The uppercut that he knocked Alistair Overeem out with was issued from the very depths of hell. He blitzed poor Jairzinho Rozenstruik like Mark Gastineau did quarterbacks in the 1980s, all limbs and locomotion. He’ll be wearing 10-ounce gloves rather than 4-ounce gloves, and he won’t be able to wrestle Fury like he did Ciryl Gane in his last UFC fight, but legends can be told through his hands when he lets them fly. That’s what the promoters are banking on. That two big heavyweights from opposing worlds will zero in on something that people want to see, even if they never really asked for it.
Many boxing fans aren’t skeptical; they are offended. They see a fraud. Moralists aren’t too happy with who’s signing the checks, either. They see the sportswashing going on with the Saudi money, and those red flags are hard to ignore, which is a story that extends far beyond the fight world. Reasonable people also wonder about Ngannou’s health. And some MMA fans can’t look at Ngannou without feeling bereft now that Jon Jones is left to fight Stipe Miocic instead of him. How Ngannou-Fury will play out is likely predictable, because Fury is a boxer of world renown, and—no matter how hard he hits or how imposing his MMA run has been—Ngannou is a debutant.
Will fight fans watch anyway? Of course they will, because the old adage is truer than ever before, especially in this age of crossover matchmaking: The fight game is built more on hype than reflection. When possibility and curiosity get together, it’s a PPV. And even if we know there might be some regrets, those are best left until the next morning.
Chuck Mindenhall writes about combat sports without bias, and sometimes about his Denver teams with extreme bias. He cohosts The Ringer MMA Show on Spotify.