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“Just go there and then do what you can do, do your best. And I think I always go by that. From the beginning, it’s always, like, give
my best. Not sure if it’s gonna be enough, but make sure that you give it your best and then the rest, you cannot control it.”
“I wasn’t calm,” he said of the fight. “I mean, I might have kept calm, but I wasn’t that confident. Because I have my ego as a man, I say, ‘Okay, I’m fighting another man. I have the capability to win.’ But at the same time, it’s my first boxing match.”
“So I’m there questioning myself if I can get through three rounds. Four rounds, if I can get there? I've never been there in my life.
And then I’m getting to the end of my career. I’m fighting a guy that has a whole experience in his entire career, getting almost to the end of it. So he’s done this tons of time. I haven’t done that.”
Ngannou also revealed that he wasn’t very confident that his knee would hold up. Francis blew it out preparing for his final UFC fight against Ciryl Gane but still went through with the fight. He’d beat Gane via unanimous decision but spend a year trying to get his knee back into proper condition.
“Can I stand up on this knee again? Like, is it gonna hold up?” he remembers wondering as he prepared for Fury. “Because I had a very hard knee surgery, a lot of complications. And for over a year I couldn’t walk properly, struggling with rehab. I’m like, is it gonna hold up or is it just gonna buckle once and for all? I don’t know. But again, do what you can do and see what happens.”
