Misfits announced Tuesday that Kenzo Biyong, the 28-year-old former professional soccer player from the Netherlands who was to challenge Ferguson at Miami’s James L. Knight Center, has withdrawn over travel complications four days from fight night. Stepping in: Mahmoud Sebie, the 34-year-old Egyptian who wrestled Greco-Roman at 75 kilograms for his country at the 2016 Rio Olympics, later attempted a transfer to Team USA before the pandemic’s postponements ended his wrestling career, and, contrary to the framing making the rounds, is no stranger to a fistfight. Sebie compiled a 6-3 professional MMA record with appearances under both the Bellator and PFL banners. Saturday may be his gloved boxing debut, but the man has been punched for a living before, which matters when assessing what Ferguson actually inherits on four days’ notice.
The coincidence underneath the booking is the kind the crossover era keeps producing. Both champion and challenger spent 2026 getting steamrolled on Real American Freestyle mats: Sebie was blanked 10-0 by NCAA star Zahid Valencia at RAF 6 in February, and Ferguson absorbed the identical 10-0 technical fall from Arman Tsarukyan at RAF 10 in June. Two men, one shared humiliation, and a Saturday agreement to settle things under the one ruleset where neither can be taken down. The stylistic reality still tilts hard toward the champion: boxing rules strip away everything that made Sebie an Olympian, no clinch to hand-fight from, no underhooks, no chain from contact to control, while Ferguson’s whole late-career reinvention has happened inside these ropes.
That reinvention is the sport’s strangest feel-good story, and it deserves its honest ledger. Ferguson, 42, left the UFC on a record-setting eight-fight losing streak that ended with a submission loss to Michael Chiesa in August 2024, a slide that had the entire sport begging him to stop. Instead he changed sports. At his Misfits debut in August 2025 he stopped Salt Papi in the third round for the interim middleweight title, snapping a winless run of nearly six years, then dropped and outpointed Warren Spencer in December to claim the full championship. He is 2-0 as a professional boxer, holds a belt, and by his own admission fights looser than he has in a decade, with the pressure of the UFC years finally off. A five-round defense against a debuting boxer, however credentialed elsewhere, carries the asymmetry all short-notice title fights do: the win reads as expected, and any struggle reads loud. But El Cucuy at 42, with a title to defend and an Olympian across the ring, is a sentence nobody would have believed in the darkest stretch of the skid, and that is its own kind of victory already.
The card around him has spent fight week eating its own bookings, which is Misfits operating at standard temperature. The Miami bill is headlined by Henry Cejudo’s professional boxing debut, except the debut got retooled too: original opponent Deen the Great re-injured his shoulder and out, and in stepped Javon “Wanna” Walton, the 20-year-old Euphoria actor and amateur standout who fights under the Most Valuable Promotions banner, giving the 39-year-old former two-division UFC champion a teenager-adjacent actor as his first professional boxing opponent. A separate bout between Plinio Cruz and Chase DeMoor was delayed two weeks by injury. Only in this corner of boxing does a former Olympic gold medalist wrestler boxing an actor headline over a former UFC interim champion boxing an Olympic wrestler, and only in 2026 does that sentence parse.
Weigh-ins land later this week, with Sebie’s four-day path to the middleweight limit its own subplot. Saturday night, the James L. Knight Center gets the fight nobody planned and everyone will watch: two men who know exactly what a 10-0 mat score feels like, finally safe from takedowns, settling it with their hands.
