Handy Francis keen to destroy
SO when did Francis Ngannou truly come to understand his power?
Maybe it was aged 19, when trying to open a door one time and he ripped the handle clean off. “Just broke in my hand,” he recalls.
Or maybe it was even younger, when this then oversized Cameroon kid would shake people’s hands only to have them complain.
“Everything was so weird,” Ngannou remembers. “At the time, I wasn’t even a fighter.
“But I was getting so much bigger than my friends.
“They all seemed so small, even the older ones. I couldn’t play with them either because I was too brutal. I didn’t mean to be though.”
Now aged 35, on a run of five straight knockouts and set to defend his UFC heavyweight crown for the first time, Ngannou is undoubtedly a story about power.
Most notably, of course, in those oversized hands.
Which entering Sunday’s UFC 270 headliner against hyped French rival Ciryl Gane, have seen him stop Stipe Miocic, Jairzinho Rozenstruik, Junior dos Santos, Cain Velasquez and Curtis Blaydes.
These are the hands UFC president Dana White once likened to being struck by a Ford Escort at full tilt.
A truth proved back in 2017, when Ngannou finished Alistair Overeem with a left hook so severe commentator Joe Rogan likened it to being “electrocuted”.
But Ngannou is also chasing a different power this Sunday, too.
As UFC champion, The Predator is not only demanding bigger fight purses from the company, but also the opportunity to box Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua or Deontay Wilder by the end of this year.
Ngannou also has the opportunity to silence Las Vegas bookmakers, who have listed him the outsider against rising star Gane.