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It’s Official: Tyson Fury vs Francis Ngannou on Oct. 28 in Saudi Arabia

This morning, July 11, 2023, Top Rank sent out a press release announcing that the long-rumored fight between lineal heavyweight champion Tyson Fury and MMA luminary Francis Ngannou is official. They will collide on Oct. 28 in Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia, in a regulation-sized boxing ring under standard boxing rules with three judges sitting ringside scoring the match on the 10-point must system. The winner will own the unofficial title of “Baddest Man on the Planet.”
The fight will be the centerpiece of the opening week of Riyadh Season, a state-sponsored sports, entertainment, and food festival with the flavor of a World’s Fair, but unlike a World’s Fair, an annual event. This is the fourth edition.
Tyson Fury, who turns 35 next month, needs no introduction to readers of this web site. The self-styled Gypsy King is 35-0-1 with 24 KOs as a pro. The draw came in the first fight of his memorable trilogy with Deontay Wilder. Fury won the second and third installments in brutal fashion. At six-foot-nine, Fury will have a five-inch height advantage over Ngannou who is expected to carry about 260 pounds on his six-foot-four frame.
Fracis Ngannou, who turns 37 on Sept. 5, has a 17-3 record inside the cage with 12 of those wins coming under the rubric of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Sixteen of his 17 wins have come by stoppage, 12 by knockout and the others by submission. Ten of his stoppages happened within the first two minutes of the opening round.
Ngannou’s signature win was a second-round knockout of Stipe Miocic on March 27, 2021, at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas during the height of the Covid pandemic. They had fought three years earlier in Boston with Miocic winning a one-sided decision. Heading into the rematch, Miocic, the Ohio-born son of Croatian immigrants, was widely considered the greatest heavyweight in UFC history.
In his most recent fight, on Jan. 22 of last year, Ngannou won a unanimous decision over previously undefeated Cyril Gane in Anaheim. He subsequently left the UFC in a contract dispute.
Ngannou supposedly holds the record for the hardest punch of any combat sports practitioner. In a 2017 test at the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas, he landed a punch measured at 129,161 units, whatever that means. UFC honcho Dana White said that if a real person had been at the end of that punch, it would have been the equivalent of being hit by a 12-pound sledgehammer launched from overhead.
Akin to Tyson Fury, who is a member of Britain’s much-maligned Irish Traveler community, Francis Ngannou has a fascinating back story. He hails from Batie, a remote village in the west-central African country of Cameroon. At age six, he went to live with his aunt after his parents divorced and, at age 10, with no formal education, he was working in a sand quarry. At age 22, says the Top Rank press release, “Francis decided to leave on foot across the Sahara, traveling on a raft across the Strait of Gibraltar on a life-threatening journey, only to find himself homeless on the streets of Paris.”
Although it has taken six years, a big heavyweight fight of this description was inevitable after what Floyd Mayweather Jr and Conor McGregor accomplished in 2017. Their match on Aug. 26 of that year at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, although widely denounced as a hoax, stands as the highest-grossing fight in combat sports history. Mayweather earned the lion’s share of a purse that purportedly totaled $410 million.
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Skavynskyi and Bustillos Win on a MarvNation Card in Long Beach

Skavynskyi and Bustillos Win on a MarvNation Card in Long Beach
LONG BEACH, Ca.-A cool autumn night saw welterweights and minimumweights share main events for a MarvNation fight card on Saturday.
Ukraine’s Eduard Skavynskyi (15-0, 7 KOs) experienced a tangled mess against the awkward Alejandro Frias (14-10-2) but won by decision after eight rounds in a welterweight contest at the indoor furnace called the Thunder Studios.
It was hot in there for the more than 600 people inside.
Skavynskyi probably never fought someone like Mexico’s Frias whose style was the opposite of the Ukrainian’s fundamentally sound one-two style. But round after round the rough edges became more familiar.
Neither fighter was ever damaged but all three judges saw Skavynskyi the winner by unanimous decision 79-73 on all three cards. The Ukrainian fighter trains in Ventura.
Bustillo Wins Rematch
In the female main event Las Vegas’ Yadira Bustillos (8-1) stepped into a rematch with Karen Lindenmuth (5-2) and immediately proved the lessons learned from their first encounter.
Bustillos connected solidly with an overhand right and staggered Lindenmuth but never came close to putting the pressure fighter down. Still, Bustillos kept turning the hard rushing Lindenmuth and snapping her head with overhand rights and check left hooks.
Lindenmuth usually overwhelms most opponents with a smothering attack that causes panic. But not against Bustillos who seemed quite comfortable all eight rounds in slipping blows and countering back.
After eight rounds all three judges scored the contest for Bustillos 78-74 and 80-72 twice. Body shots were especially effective for the Las Vegas fighter in the fifth round. Bustillos competes in the same division as IBF/WBO title-holder Yokasta Valle.
Other Bouts
In a middleweight clash, undefeated Victorville’s Andrew Buchanan (3-0-1) used effective combination punching to defeat Mexico’s Fredy Vargas (2-1-1) after six rounds. Two judges scored it 59-55 and a third 60-54 for Buchanan. No knockdowns were scored.
A super lightweight match saw Sergio Aldana win his pro debut by decision after four rounds versus Gerardo Fuentes (2-9-1).
Photos credit: Al Applerose
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Tedious Fights and a Controversial Draw Smudge the Matchroom Boxing Card in Orlando

Matchroom Boxing was at the sprawling Royale Caribe Resort Hotel in Orlando, Florida tonight with a card that aired on DAZN. The main event was a ho-hum affair between super lightweights Richardson Hitchins and Jose Zepeda.
SoCal’s Zepeda has been in some wars in the past, notably his savage tussle with Ivan Baranchyk, but tonight he brought little to the table and was outclassed by the lanky Hitchins who won all 12 rounds on two of the cards and 11 rounds on the other. There were no knockdowns, but Zepeda suffered a cut on his forehead in round seven that was deemed to be the product of an accidental head butt and another clash in round ten forced a respite in the action although Hitchins suffered no apparent damage.
It was the sort of fight where each round was pretty much a carbon of the round preceding it. Brooklyn’s Hitchins, who improved to 17-0 (7), was content to pepper Zepeda with his jab, and the 34-year-old SoCal southpaw, who brought a 37-3 record, was never able to penetrate his defense and land anything meaningful.
Hitchins signed with Floyd Mayweather Jr’s promotional outfit coming out of the amateur ranks and his style is reminiscent in ways of his former mentor. Like Mayweather, he loses very few rounds. In his precious engagement, he pitched a shutout over previously undefeated John Bauza.
Co-Feature
In the co-feature, Conor Benn returned to the ring after an absence of 17 months and won a unanimous decision over Mexico’s Rodolfo Orozco. It wasn’t a bad showing by Benn who showed decent boxing skills, but more was expected of him after his name had been bandied about so often in the media. Two of the judges had it 99-91 and the other 96-94.
Benn (22-0, 14 KOs) was a late addition to the card although one suspects that promoter Eddie Hearn purposely kept him under wraps until the week of the fight so as not to deflect the spotlight from the other matches on his show. Benn lost a lucrative date with Chris Eubank Jr when he was suspended by the BBBofC when evidence of a banned substance was found in his system and it’s understood that Hearn has designs on re-igniting the match-up with an eye on a date in December. For tonight’s fight, Benn carried a career-high 153 ½ pounds. Mexico’s Orozco, who was making his first appearance in a U.S. ring, declined to 32-4-3.
Other Bouts of Note
The welterweight title fight between WBA/WBC title-holder Jessica McCaskill (15-3-1) and WBO title-holder Sandy Ryan (6-1-1) ended in a draw and the ladies’ retain their respective titles. Ryan worked the body effectively and the general feeling was that she got a raw deal, a sentiment shared by the crowd which booed the decision. There was a switch of favorites in the betting with the late money seemingly all on the Englishwoman who at age 30 was the younger boxer by nine years.
The judges had it 96-94 Ryan, 96-95, and a vilified 97-93 for Chicago’s McCaskill.
In the opener of the main DAZN stream, Houston middleweight Austin “Ammo” Williams, 27, improved to 15-0 (10) with a 10-round unanimous decision over 39-year-old Toronto veteran Steve Rolls (22-3). All three judges had it 97-93. Rolls has been stopped only once, that by Gennady Golovkin.
Photo credit: Ed Mulholland / Matchroom Boxing
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Zhilei Zhang KOs Joe Joyce; Calls Out Tyson Fury

Joe Joyce activated his rematch clause after being stopped in the sixth frame by Zhilei Zhang in their first meeting. In hindsight, he may wish that he hadn’t. Tonight at London’s Wembley Stadium, Zhang stopped him again and far more conclusively than in their first encounter.
In the first meeting, Zhang, a southpaw, found a steady home for his stiff left jab. Targeting Joyce’s right eye, he eventually damaged the optic to where the ring doctor wouldn’t let Joyce continue. At the end, the fight was close on the cards and Joyce was confident that he would have pulled away if not for the issue with his eye.
In the rematch tonight, Zhang (26-1-1, 21 KOs) closed the curtain with his right hand. A thunderous right hook on the heels of a straight left pitched Joyce to the canvas where he landed face first. He appeared to beat the count by a whisker, but was seriously dazed and referee Steve Gray properly waived it off. The official time was 3:07 of round three.
Zhang, who lived up to his nickname, “Big Bang,” was credited with landing 29 power punches compared with only six for Joyce (15-2) who came in 25 pounds heavier than in their first meeting while still looking properly conditioned. One would be inclined to say that age finally caught with the “Juggernaut” who turned 38 since their last encounter, but Zhang, 40, is actually the older man. In his post-fight interview in the ring, the New Jersey resident, a two-time Olympian for China, when asked who he wanted to fight next, turned to the audience and said, “Do you want to see me shut Tyson Fury up?”
He meant it as a rhetorical question.
Semi-Windup
Light heavyweight Anthony Yarde was matched soft against late sub Jorge Silva, a 40-year-old Portuguese journeyman, and barely broke a sweat while scoring a second-round stoppage. Yarde backed Silva against a corner post and put him on the deck with a short right hand. Silva’s body language indicated that he had no interest in continuing and the referee accommodated him. The official time was 2:07 of round two.
A 30-year-old Londoner, Yarde (24-3, 23 KOs) was making his first start since being stopped in eight rounds by Artur Beterbiev in a bout that Yarde was winning on two of the scorecards. Silva, a late replacement for 19-3-1 Ricky Summers, falls to 22-9.
Also
Former leading super middleweight contender Zach Parker (23-1, 17 KOs) returned to the ring in a “shake-off-the-rust” fight against 40-year-old Frenchman Khalid Graidia and performed as expected. Graidia’s corner pulled him out after seven one-sided rounds.
In his previous fight, Parker was matched against John Ryder who he was favored to beat. The carrot for the winner was a lucrative date with Canelo Alvarez. Unfortunately for Parker, he suffered a broken hand and was unable to continue after four frames. Tonight, he carried 174 pounds, a hint that he plans to compete as a light heavyweight going forward. Indeed, he has expressed an interest in fighting Anthony Yarde. Graidia declined to 10-13-4.
The Zhang-Joyce and Yarde-Silva fights were live-streamed in the U.S. on ESPN+.
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