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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