“I was like the subject of shame” Francis Ngannou talks about overcoming the emotional tribulations of poverty
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Francis Ngannou is the heaviest hitter in the UFC right now. One punch and any heavyweight could have their lights shut out by the Cameroonian.
However, life wasn’t always fair to the heavyweight champion, who has time and again talked of the travails of navigating extreme poverty in Cameroon. Ngannou has detailed how he used to be a mine worker in his home country, before being able to find his way to France.
Speaking of the emotional trials associated with overcoming abject poverty, he said, “You never feel like you’ve made it. I cannot walk out there, cross a pen without picking it up instantly. Because I grew up – a pen for me was gold. I’ll pick up a pen all day long, like… I’m not poor anymore. (But), 50 years after, If I saw a pen, instantly I’ll pick it up.”
Francis Ngannou may be UFC champ worth millions, but he says ‘you never feel’ like you’ve made it
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Continuing, he said, “Life threw me a lot of punches at the moment that I couldn’t counter. Life put me down and made people doubt me, look at me sometimes like I’m a piece of sh*t. People who want to remember me like that – that’s not happening. I’m too proud to accept those kinds of things.”
“I was so embarrassed all the time. I was like the subject of shame, and nobody’s really excited to be friends with that kid – the kid that didn’t have a pen. The kid that was thrown out of the class in the middle of the class because he didn’t have a pen… Now, I have boxes in my house.”, he said, concluding.
Francis Ngannou’s rags to riches story is straight out of a storybook
If he can’t eventually enter the conversation for one of the greatest heavyweight champions of the UFC, at least he can be the cover boy for the quintessential American Dream.
He himself has said on occasion, that, he grew up working in a sand mine. Francis lived with his grandmother in a one-room, brick-and-dirt house in a tiny village.
Fearing drudgery for the rest of his life, Ngannou undertook the toil to cross over from Cameroon to France. The journey took him one year, as he had to undergo extreme difficulty to chart territory in Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Algeria, Morocco, Spain and then, finally, France. While preparing for the border crossing in Morocco, Ngannou reportedly ate from bins and cut himself with barbed wire, as per TheMirror.
Entering France, Francis Ngannou had no spare change to house himself, so his former MMA coach Fernand Lopez offered him shelter and the gym’s services as a respite. The rest is history, as the UFC signed him in 2015, and today, he’s the heavyweight champion of the world. Quite the life he has gone through!
Despite what might seem to be a Cinderella story, Francis Ngannou finds himself embroiled in a contract dispute with the UFC and Dana White, and with no clear date for Jon Jones’ return, his future in the promotion is up in the air.
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Udayan Mukherjee
(382 Articles Published)